One Just and Verdant Internet of Things
While chilly winds blew on Orchard Street this sunny Friday morning, the most fashionable tour guides I have ever seen disseminated like a pack of police dogs to sets of crowds shivering on the corners. What an organized place is the Tenement Museum. It is like a train depot!
Our tour guide was thoughtful, contemplative, concerned. Kat was an excellent listener and interlocutor. We could tell she was well-trained in their new interactive and technological additions as enhanced by Potion Design. The projections coming from under the sewing machines turned on by a simple touch of the hand to Singer machinery, or the audio lamp above the rice cooking station that played when your hand brushed a metal bowl were easy, subtle even, making the stories, the content, the recent history, and real emotion all the more accessible. Great, well-deserved pride from the Wong family, and from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Hearing Paul Anka together while sitting on family beds, I cried when brain cancer reached Mrs. Epstein and she remembered to write down the names. Then, in Ramonita’s living room when I learned her son went to the Air Force and to Vietnam, his brother a successful landlord, and their family dedicated to strengthening bilingual education. What good people.
Of course the New Museum is a stronghold in the very high art that could only be Manhattan’s, filled with the best and brightest pretensions of people you could ask for, and I mean that in the kindest possible way. What would New York be without the risky fashion, the demurely masked insecurity, the really strict and sharp angles, lines, creative daggers of the abstract. Large elevators. Lots of staring and then looking away.
But nothing could have prepared me for the spaceship we boarded. NEW INC is fast-paced, on a roll, and kind of the best version of a shared workspace and professional development program I can handle right now, what with all the labs out there. Our discussion and workshop were a microcosm of the subject itself: fast, connected/disconnected, reconnecting, breaking projectors, and making directors leave arms of the Smithsonian. Sign of the times we live in. Vague, I know, but it’s interdisciplinary. Like our assignment. We are supposed to be confused. We are boarding an unidentified peregrinating object!
Select images courtesy of:
http://www.newinc.org
http://tenement.org/blog/tag/under-one-roof/
