August 25, 2005
The Gates: A Visual Literacy Case Study
12:45 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
I came across this fantastic online lecture about the Gates by John Weber, Director of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. It's called The Gates: A Visual Literacy Case Study. He says things like: "I'm going to guess that more pixels and film were expended on it than have been deployed in the service of any single work of art to date, and while I can't prove it, I'm sure this has to be true. Walking through the Park with a camera in hand it was impossible to avoid taking one picture after another in an attempt to find the perfect summation of the experience." Bravo John, we couldn't agree more.
Posted by kim white
June 7, 2005
Sorting the Pile
5:36 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
The Gates Memory Project blog will remain dormant for the time being as we plan next steps for the archive. As of this writing, there are 3,564 photos collected under the "gatesmemory" tag in Flickr. Contributions have certainly slowed, but new work has continued to trickle in. If you still have images you'd like to be part of the project, it's certainly not too late!
As part of working through our ideas, we've submitted a paper to the 2005 Computers & Writing Online Conference that discusses our experience of creating a networked archive with everyday social software tools. The paper, "Sorting the Pile: Making Sense of A Networked Archive," can be viewed here.
Thanks to all who have contributed. Keep checking back for updates on the project.
Posted by ben vershbow
June 3, 2005
"Christo's Dream," by Becky Phillips, 18.5" x 14.5"
11:33 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Remix
From djwhelan:
"In early April 2005, a Florida-based quilter, Becky Phillips (Flickr | Webshots), contacted me about using my Gates images as the theme and inspiration for a monthly quilting challenge in which she and some far-flung quilters participate. I gladly made my works available to them.
"Becky used "The Gates Stand Alone" as the starting point for the group, but her quilt ended up being inspired by my "Torn".
"This is part of the power and excitement behind Flickr! I am honored to be the inspiration for an effort like this, and I look forward to being part of other such collaborations."
Posted by ben vershbow
April 29, 2005
Gates summer share
2:28 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
Cape Cod News published some great parodies of the Gates. The Eastham Gates were my favorite (pictured above).
Posted by kim white
April 27, 2005
a del.icio.us anthology
11:35 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
The Gates Memory Project now has a del.icio.us bookmark page. We are using it to compile a list of online stories and other ephemera about the Gates project. It will serve as a companion to our Flickr photo archive. To be included, post a comment below with your url, or add the tag "gatesmemory" to your del.icio.us account.
Posted by kim white
April 25, 2005
built by community
12:06 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Stories
GatesInstallerTeam2.2
Originally uploaded by Amelia 11211.
The Gates were a quintessentially public work of art built by the public for the public. The following articles give a brief glimpse into the life and experience of Gatesworkers.
Hello all from the Gates Project by
Maja Klüver
A Day in the Life of Gate 8430
By ADAM NICHOLS, Daily News Staff Writer
We meet the people passing through one portal
Central Park Makeover: Reality Show, in a Way
By CAROL VOGEL, New York Times, Feb. 10, 2005
The paid volunteers installing Christo's "Gates" in Central Park share a common bond: a resolve to be a part of the city's biggest public-art happening ever.
Art Project Pilgrims Prepare to Install 'The Gates'
By CAROL VOGEL New York Times, Feb. 5, 2005
Hundreds of workers put their lives on hold to install "The Gates."
Posted by kim white
April 15, 2005
Kid's-eye view of the Gates
9:52 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Remix
Fourth grade students at Dalton have created their own Gates memory project. After learning about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, and visiting the Gates through different stages of their installation, students created journal entries, poems, and artworks. These reflections were synthesized in a "culminating project," a work of art that interpretated the Gates experience. The projects are marvelous. Above, left is a picture by Isabelle. Above right is Gabriel's collage which incorporates a poem.
Posted by kim white
summit
8:00 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
For some reason, I find this photograph incredibly compelling. The fabric and frame meld together, almost becoming abstract. It resembles some sort of crag, or peak. Definitely recommend clicking for larger view...
Posted by ben vershbow
April 14, 2005
where do we go from here?
8:42 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
Ben and I have been talking at length about the next step for the gates memory project. We came up with three ideas briefly outlined below. We decided to open up our internal conversation to our readers. Please let us know what you think.
FIRST IDEA
Unless we actively engage them, memories fade.
We've now collected over 3,000 photographs of the Gates in Flickr. Let's try to imagine an interface that captures the perishability of memory and at the same time gives a compelling reason to interact - i.e. if you don't, it will all disappear.
This could work in many ways. Here are two:
1. Rating
Visitors could watch a random slideshow of the archive. Next to each picture there would be sliding meter between "remember" and "forget." If you love the photo you will slide it to the top. If you hate the photo, you will slide it all the way down to forget. Most will choose somewhere in the middle. These actions will be registered on some sort of visualization of the entire archive - a grid, say, with every photo arranged as a small tile. Depending on visitors' actions during the slideshow, some tiles will be brighter than others. Some will have paled slightly, some will be very faded out, and some will have disappeared altogether. The more people visit, the more nuanced this memory map will become, and photos will fluctuate in and out of memory. You can either let it go on indefinitely, or eventually freeze it and voila: your lasting, definitive document.
2. Half Life
This is about imbuing the archive with a sense of decay and steady erosion. The archive is fading away and can only be held onto if people interact with it. It's not so much about rating individual components as keeping contact with the collective. Like a bit torrent, as soon as people abandon it, it dies.
SECOND IDEA
Archives as landscape: this interface allows visitors to "play" with the images to build a collective work of art that reconstructs the Gates photo archives as virtual pathways.
We would turn each of the 3,000+ Gates photos into a tile which can be dragged and dropped onto a surface/screen that is scrollable horizontally and vertically. The object of the game is to layout a string of photos that connect to each other like dominos. Orange bleeding off the side of a photo = a possible connection. Visitors look for images that begin where the last one left off. These progressions can proceed vertically, horizontally or diagonally, growing and spreading as visitors search the archives, finding new connections and adding new tiles. We could also allow users to "edit" the collage, replacing existing photos with better photos.
The Result: threads that build and ribbon across the space will form a kind of virtual memory of movement through the Gates. The landscape of our collage can be examined close up or far away, using a zoom function. Zooming out gives you an aerial view of the Gates, zooming in allows you to see it on the ground level.
GUEST EDITOR PROJECT
We would like to ask guest editors to review the photo archives and select pictures that exemplify a single, specific idea about the Gates. Each editor will have something different to say. Our hope is that a multifaceted understanding of the Gates project will emerge when the various viewpoints are seen/read together.
For the guest editor project, Ben feels strongly, and I agree that this should take place on on our existing blog rather than on a new one. The guest editor project could be a distinct thread on the Gates blog, or it could take over the entire blog (I lean towards the latter). To get the project going, guest editors should send an email to Ben or to me with the contents of their blog post (text and links to the photos they want posted) and we will post it for them. If the project mushrooms and we get several submissions a day, we should talk to Kalina about building a form field for submissions.
Another way to go is to utilize Flickr's "my favorites" function, which allows users to create a page with their favorite photos. We could ask Gates visitors to make a page of favorites and we could create a gallery space on our website to display clickable thumbnails of these pages. The only problem with this option is that the favorites function does not have a space to write commentary, so this would be a strictly visual commentary.
Bob's thoughts
i love the Rating concept -- especially if we could make it work like the baby name site
half-life is interesting, but not clear to me why the archive should die if no one looks at it for awhile -- a key rationale of an archive is to counter ephemerality
the game is OK, but seems forced and a bit trivial as it only draws on the geometry of the photos; i.e. an interesting exercise but not clear what importance it elucidates re:The Gates as a work of art.
agree that if we do the guest photo editor -- which i still think we should because that can be started immediately, while we develop other ideas such as the Rating meter -- that it should be on the existing gates memory blog.
Dan says:
2. Half Life
I like the idea of this. But how do you make something like information-death tangible on the Internet? The internet's made information cheap: we feel like even if one website dies, someone will have a copy somewhere. (This isn't always true, of course - despite the efforts of archive.org, a lot of the internet did prove ephemeral.) How would we do this with Flickr images if a) the images don't belong (a loaded word) to us, and b) they're on Flickr already?
SECOND IDEA: Archives as landscape:
This wouldn't be hard to do - there are a lot of slide puzzles done in Java or JavaScript & we could pull the code apart until it suited our purposes. Is this, though, the sort of project that might be done best by a computer program, then edited by hand? Or maybe have a computer program that does it algorithmically side by side with a human-edited version: the two could be aesthetically compared.
GUEST EDITOR PROJECT
What if we combined a link to Flickr's "my favorites" with a blog post? The editor could write a paragraph or so about what they liked, then there could be a link. Or a thumbnail of the page could be a link if they didn't want to write commentary.
Posted by kim white
April 13, 2005
jump
6:00 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
This gets the angle perfectly. One sculpture activating another.
"The horse looks as if it is irritated by all the saffron, it jumps a gate."
Posted by ben vershbow
Chuck's Gates--Cost: $25
1:05 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
"The local junk guy had his take on Christo's Gates. I saw The Gates in NYC and I loved them. But these made a statement of their own and I love these, too. And art lives in Roberts, Montana."
Posted by ben vershbow
April 12, 2005
tape drawing + the baby gates
2:58 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
In a way, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's definitive work on the Gates is the sketches - the 25 years of planning, campaigning, and sustaining the vision. But the minute the first banner unfurled, the Gates belonged to everyone. There will eventually be a "definitive" book of C and J-C-approved photographs, just as there is already a definitive volume collecting the sketches. I would argue, though, that it is only the latter that can claim the definition of something. Since they belong to everyone, everyone has the right to re-situate the Gates and define them as they choose. R.bean's strange tape structure with baby gates is a great contribution to the collective memory.
Posted by ben vershbow
The Collective Collects
11:49 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Stories
The Gates Memory project is working in collaboration with Flickr to collect and archive photos of the Gates. We are also relying on the internet community to help us connect to stories, conversations, blog posts and articles that have emerged in response to the Gates installation. Sites like Furl, del.icio.us, and technorati do for blog posts what Flickr does for photos. Technorati, for example, has 59 posts from 23 blogs tagged with "the Gates."
Several blogs have taken up the task of archiving (by copying and pasting) all the articles they can find about the Gates. nyc.architecture.com, 1 Central Park Forum, and wired new york.com just to list a few.
Most interesting are the blogs that really try to understand all of these points of view. Ann Althouse's February 13, 2005 blog post "Is anyone saying anything interesting about "The Gates"? tries to find conversations and critiques that look "beyond the basic facts (Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent $21 million of their own money and accepted no grants), the obvious starter question "Is it art," and the snap judgments (from "I love it" to "Get this out of my park").
Posted by kim white
April 11, 2005
beautiful photos by Enigmanote
8:06 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
I haven't seen any photos quite like these. There's a nice hazy distance in all of them, and a restrained, but nevertheless dreamlike hypercolor.
Posted by ben vershbow
April 7, 2005
Meer Reflections
11:27 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Posted by ben vershbow
April 5, 2005
The Process
10:55 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Stories
In an article in
Art a Go Go, Kathleen Lang writes about the length of time it takes Christo and Jeanne-Claude to realize their art works. "Sometimes it can take years for the artists to obtain the required permits to carry out their plans. The permit process often requires extensive environmental studies, costing millions of dollars. Avoiding words like "red tape" or "bureaucracy," Christo and Jeanne-Claude simply call their quest to get a project approved as "process."
Interesting to note that this is exactly how we are proceeding with the documentation of the Gates. We are interested in the process as much as the end-result. How will the experience of the Gates be unpacked, discussed, and re-assembled by a large and diverse group of observers? To follow are a few examples.
A film documentary by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles is currently in production. The filmmakers have been following the Gates project throughout its 25-year life-span. Both Leslie Camhi and Kathryn Shattuck, mention the Maysles documentary in their respective articles on February 8th.
During their brief stay, Justin Ferate, an award winning tour guide offered historical background to go with the direct experience in his walking tour of Central Park and the Gates described as follows on his website: discover the interrelationships between the billowing saffron-colored Gates and Vaux and Olmsted's magnificent Central Park. Learn of Christo's career and of his artworks around the world. Experience the tremendous transformations of Central Park and the most recent visions for its future.
There are a wealth of creative approaches to understanding the artistic value the Gates. The New Criterion published a quiz-style art review that compared Christo and Thomas Kinkade. This article was followed up by post on the blog StepNewz Christo vs. Thomas Kinkade: Reloaded
A blog called "the Sheila Variations," offers this hilarious collaborative art review, poking fun at the cliches of art criticism.
Several other blogs stage rich discussions/debates over the artistic value of the Gates. Two good examples are: The Charlie Rose Show's: Tell us what you think discussion board A river the color of saffron IS art and Republican Professor's glowing review of the Gates with contentious discussion to follow.
Posted by kim white
April 4, 2005
the gates at wesleyan
2:32 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
The collegiate Gates parodies continue to roll. Latest iteration: an april fool's piece in the Argus, the student paper at Wesleyan. Anyone know if they actually put it up, or was it just in the article?
Posted by ben vershbow
verticals
1:14 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
1
2
1) Vertical Shine - originally uploaded by rfwomon
2) VERTIGATES - originally uploaded by Red Hawk
Posted by ben vershbow
April 1, 2005
faking places: the grates
10:50 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
Abigail points to a great a April fooling by the Project for Public Spaces, also known as the Project for Phony Spaces, supposedly "a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities." Paging through their site, you're not quite sure if what you're looking at is serious. At one moment they talk about "placemaking," a kind of enlightened urban planning technique, all under the Public Spaces banner. Turn the page and suddenly they're talking glibly about "placefaking," under the phony banner. It's a genuine fake.
Their April 1st newsletter announces plans for the next project from Christo-Bloomberg productions, the Grates - a series of turquoise banners installed over the city's sewer grates.
Thanks, Abigail!
Posted by ben vershbow
March 31, 2005
Perplexed
3:36 PM (permalink) | Comments (5) | file under: questions about media types
on the last official day of The Gates, during the 7-hour marathon walk through the park with ashton, rebeca mendez, and adam eeuwens, rebeca and i talked at length about locating art in time rather than space. The Gates, rebeca pointed out are a perfect example of artwork that has to be experienced over time. Seems true enough. However if it's true, how come the photos people took of The Gates seem to be more compelling than the video. i think it's quite possible that this is an artifact of the fact that many of us have developed decent amateur photography skills during a life-time of photo taking, and simply haven't had enough experience shooting video. but there may be something else going on, specific to The Gates themselves. would love to know what people think about this? to prime the discussion pump, i've put up a bunch of video snapshots that a friend and i made. and here's a link to the Gates Memory photographs on Flickr.
Posted by bob stein
more from the Lerner Gates underground
12:16 AM (permalink) | Comments (1) | file under: Parody
I just had a brief email exchange with the mysterious authors of the Lerner Hall jape. I asked them how they got the idea. Like the prank itself, it was quite simple:
"We just sat around, and one of us (who had not left campus in a while and lamented the fact that they had not seen the gates) had the idea of doing it for the senior prank. Other than that, we got some orange tarps, some dowels, and some shower hooks, along with some structural planning and design, and that was it. Fin."
Posted by ben vershbow
March 30, 2005
gates memory project in Time Out NY!
3:58 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
Posted by ben vershbow
the scepter
10:51 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Posted by ben vershbow
March 29, 2005
invisible columbia pranksters
12:32 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
An image of the fantastic Gates prank in Alfred Lerner Hall appeared today in the Columbia Spectator with a brief caption attributing the stunt to an underground group of seniors. It appears they snuck in yesterday at 1am, just as Lerner was closing, and quietly installed the banners. They finished at 4am and snuck back out. Above are the image and caption from the Spectator. I've also created a small photo set of my shots on Flickr.
Posted by ben vershbow
March 28, 2005
the gates at columbia
5:24 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
Columbia's class of '05 has executed a great prank at Alfred Lerner Hall, the main student center on campus. In spite of truly foul weather, I managed to get some pics (captions link to Flickr).
Posted by ben vershbow
The Fun of Making Fun
1:22 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
The Gates had an unmistakable joie de vivre; they were about fun, and parodies of the Gates attest to that. Their puzzling non-art/art status, their exuberant orange, their rhythmic repetition, their grand scale and defiantly ephemeral nature inspired a crop of brilliant parodies that entertained supporters and detractors alike.
The John Stewart show's hilarious commentary on the gates can be viewed On Lisa Rein's Radar.
Artist and photographer, khang kijarro nguyen is responsible for the toothpick gates executed february 2005 in central park, a site specific art installation coinciding with another site specific art installation of strikingly similar appearance in the back ground.
The miniature, Sommerville gates or Hargo's gates, as they were called, were perhaps the most widely-known. The website for the installation, which traces the pathways of creator Geoff Hargadon's cat through his Sommerville apartment, got 5.5 million hits in one week and Hargadon received about 3,000 e-mails from fans and academics.
In an equally hilarious tongue-in-cheek associated press article published on MSNBC's website Hargadon said that his project wasn't intended to mock the Central Park installation, which Hargadon visited last week and enjoyed. His target is the monumental hype…one review, which called "The Gates" the first great public art creation of the 21st century, pushed Hargadon over the edge. Soon he was at The Home Depot buying materials for his own project.
The article went on to say that Hargadon has no plans to make money from his gates. However, he does plans to auction one gate to benefit the Massachusetts College of Art.
"From what I can tell, it's majorly important for him to keep it pure," said friend and co-worker, Bart Smith.
The Sommerville Gates provoked discussion on dozens of blogs including, The Conversation Café and Brian Bernard's blog. Brian is a big fan of the Sommerville Gates and is assembling an archives of all the photos he can find, a sort of sister project to our Gates Memory archives.
I also love the simple parodies that focus on the orange color and the repeated motif such as the snack crackers parody.
Many visitors took pleasure in finding themselves or others costumed in similar saffron hues, as many of the photos uploaded to Flickr including Rochelle Ratner's shot of a man with orange scarf and pamplet attest. Some took it a step further, celebrating the Gates by participating in an orange-hued conga line. One Gates fan even created her own line of "Gates Viewing Attire."
Posted by kim white
gaming the gates
11:31 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Fantastic photo from IT IN place - the Gates as seen on the new PlayStation Portable (thanks, Alex).
"Max plays with the PSP" - Damon Itin '05
The only Gates games I can think of are pretty dumb - dueling installation crews, tennis ball pole jousting, or racing gates (imagine Super Mario Kart with Central Park Conservancy golf carts). But seriously, the archive should be viewable on smaller screens.
Posted by ben vershbow
March 26, 2005
Video Gates
11:31 AM (permalink) | Comments (1) | file under: General
Via Unmediated, Flickr for Video:
Mefeedia has inconspicuously turned into Flickr for video, at least in terms of tag usage. Several of us that use Mefeedia are putting out a call for people to add videos with the tag "gates", in honor of Christo and Jean Claude's Central Park exhibit.
You can see the start of the compilation here. More and more videos will be added over the next two weeks and we are encouraging anyone who has video of The Gates posted on their site to submit it to Mefeedia.
If you use an RSS reader, you can add this feed to keep up with any new videos that show up with the same tag.
Posted by michal migurski
March 25, 2005
a single place can be bottomless
1:49 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Last week, Flickr photographer ejmachad posted three luminous photos of Gapstow Bridge. There are two versions of each, identical as far as I can tell. We have over 2,700 photographs now tagged with "gatesmemory." Many are new uploads, and many are photographs that were already on Flickr before we announced the project. For the latter, some simply added the new tag to all their Gates-related photos. Others made a selection. Already, people are thinking as curators, as editors - it's interesting to see how the project added another layer to the Flickr system. ejmachad only uploaded these photos of Gapstow Bridge. He/she may have taken dozens or hundreds of other Gates photographs, in as many other locations in the park, but something clearly came together here. There's a nice feeling of having settled into one place, drawing on its full depth.
Posted by ben vershbow
The Gates in the News
8:29 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Stories
This is the first in a series of posts summarizing news stories about the Gates. So far, they seem to be breaking down into three catagories: money (how much they cost and how many tourist dollars they brought in), their value as artwork and their "meaning", and the community response to the Gates.
Religious Leaders Draw Spiritual Meaning from 'The Gates'
By Adam Phillips, Voice of America, 11 March 2005
Details about the interfaith event titled, "Spirit of the Gates," which took place in Central Park on February 21, 2005 and drew religious leaders and worshippers from a variety of faiths.
Christo's Gates: A Little Creaky
By Blake Gopnik, Washington Post, Sunday, February 13, 2005; Page D01
Blake Gopnik contemplates the meaning of the Gates.
Christo's Gates in Central Park
By Carolyn Weaver, News VOA Com, New York City, 15 February 2005.
Embedded in Christo's "Gates"
by Deborah Ripley, artnet
Deborah Ripley, a NY art dealer, writes about the Gates from the perspective of a Central Park Conservancy volunteer.
Christo's Gates: Big $ for Big Apple:
Artist's central park project brought in $254 million in economic activity for the city: mayor.
March 3, 2005: 3:58 PM EST
CNN Money reports on the financial windfall created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "free" art display.
Christo's 'Gates': Lots of green for the orange
By Mike McIntire, The New York Times (as seen on the International Herald Tribune online), Saturday, March 5, 2005
Christo's 'Gates' Open in Central Park
this page gives you a listing of the stories NPR ran on the Christo project and an opportunity to listen to them. Stories include:
Christo's 'Gates:' Preparing for a Short Stay by Margot Adler, All Things Considered, January 28, 2005
Miles-Long Christo Art Exhibit to Open in Central Park by Neda Ulaby, Morning Edition, February 9, 2005
Central Park's Bright New Clothes Talk of the Nation, February 10, 2005, with guests Adam Sternbergh and Robert Storr.
Christo's 'Gates' Finally Open by Robert Smith, All Things Considered, February 12, 2005
Christo Does Central Park by Margot Adler, Weekend Edition - Saturday, February 12, 2005
Awe, disdain for Christo's 'Gates' Reuters article, seen on Fairfax Digital (an Australian News Organization), February 14, 2005
Reports on the various reactions to the Gates.
New York buzzing over Christo's 'Gates' CBC Arts, Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:14:28 EST
A Canadian news service reports on the Gates
Posted by kim white
March 23, 2005
Their Stories
2:03 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Stories
The truly wonderful thing about the web is the opportunities it creates for networks and connections. Stories culled from personal blogs--those glorious online self-portraits that offer interesting "peeks" into the blogger's thought-life, home-life, and work-life--will be a textual counterpart to our Flickr image bank. What makes this "chapter" particularly interesting, is that we plan to leave the stories in their original context (for now at least). You can access them through links to the personal weblogs themselves.
If you have a story, please post the url in our comment section.
Three wonderful essays from Lorianne DiSabato's blog "Hoarded Ordinaries"
1
2
3
"and i quote" (favorite quotes collected by Mr. Hell's Kitchen)
Korijane about a wedding she witnessed beneath the Gates
And the detractors:
Chris Dykstra
I'll be starting another thread tomorrow archiving News Articles about the Gates. Here's a sneak peek:
WNYC transcript of a story about a procession of Buddhist Monks through the Gates
Posted by kim white
March 22, 2005
gates rain
12:21 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
gates rain
Originally uploaded by joeholmes.
Image of the day.
Posted by kim white
March 21, 2005
"simplified images"
4:00 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Posted by ben vershbow
March 17, 2005
The Gates, on average
11:39 PM (permalink) | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2) | file under: Remix
brevity writes:
I wrote a program to blend Flickr images which share the same tags. It's partially inspired by the work of Jason Salavon.
Posted by michal migurski
images of the day
5:18 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
1. rain and saffron - originally uploaded by Thom.
2. held - originally uploaded by Thom.
Posted by ben vershbow
Blogging the Experience
11:22 AM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
"It's only the gates. A work of art of joy and beauty," -- Jeanne-Claude.
When their creators, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, declared that the Gates had no meaning, they were, in this writers estimation, attempting to get the viewing public to ignore the art-world preoccupation with capital M "meaning" and instead think of art as a catalyst for experience, connection, and pleasure.
My favorite personal essay on the Gates comes from David Patrick Columbia's "New York Social Diary." It's a marvelous explaination of why the Gates are great. Plus, he makes his observations while lunching with NY art-world celebs on a fabulous Central Park South terrace--stunning photos of the bird's-eye view included.
"Meaningful Connections" Blog comes up first on a Google search for "Christo's Gates." It has a small selection of reader experiences. Dan Zukowski's entry was particularly interesting. It documents the conversation he had with himself as he attempted to ignore the hype and experience that Gates as honestly as possible. Here is an excerpt.
Crossing Madison Avenue and 96th street - two blocks from Central Park:
Looming larger - I like the orange color - saffron they call it. Now I see lots of gates. Nice - This is interesting. OK OK A big population of gates. OK Look at that! I see my first shot. See those three gates against the big tree - OK- I feel engaged.
And there were several blogs by people whose experience of the Gates was only through second-hand information, the photographs and stories of others.
Posted by kim white
March 16, 2005
the Gates recycled
5:27 PM (permalink) | Comments (2) | file under: General
Newsday ran a great article yesterday describing the recycling of the Gates in Nazareth, Pennsylvania at Nicos Polymers & Grinding Inc. Evidently, they are taking great pains to ensure that no materials are stolen while awaiting destruction, and that the nylon mulch and re-ground PVC pipe do not become collector's items in their own right (though this seems inevitable).
From a particularly vivid passage in the article:
"Delivery trucks back up to the 180,000-square-foot plant, revealing orange poles stacked floor to ceiling in snug, honeycomb-like symmetry. The other day, the driver of a saffron-colored forklift was off-loading 120 poles at a time while another worker, Hilberto Mendez, handled the grinding.
"Mendez plucked a 16-foot pole from a neat stack and slid it into the maw-like chute of a Cumberland grinder, which distantly resembled an industrial-sized Cuisinart. The grinder swallowed the pole whole, as if it was a 16-foot carrot stick, and with a grating crash chewed it into lightweight orange "gravel," which it spit into a 3-foot cardboard cube."
This ties in nicely to the "gates as labor" discussion that began here the other day.
(Photo by Rick Smith)
Posted by ben vershbow
image of the day
5:10 PM (permalink) | Comments (1) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Central Park has always been a sort of city dweller's fantasy, aided in no small part by the majestic West Side skyscrapers (the San Remo being one of the finest). The Gates took this several steps further. From certain vantages, they seemed like a royal processional leading to these strange, looming castles.
A number of photographers have chosen to emphasize the Gates' bright color against the wintry landscape by photoshopping the image to produce a black-and-white background. This one does it particularly well.
Posted by ben vershbow
March 15, 2005
gates go AWOL
5:31 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Remix
The Gates were once bound by time and space (16 days in Central Park). But no more. With thousands upon thousands of shots from every conceivable vantage, we've reached critical mass. The Gates have broken the boundaries of the park and are now officially at large. Imagine the Great Wall of China dotted with billowing saffron gates, or gates lining the shores of Lake Michigan, or gates along a jetty, receding into the ocean. Or imagine an astronaut on the moon holding not a flag, but the signature tennis ball-capped de-snagging pole... This afternoon, we cobbled together a couple of Gates remixes and came up with ideas for dozens more. This could open up a great new chapter of the project. Create your own, post them on Flickr with the "gatesmemory" tag, and comment here with a link.
Posted by ben vershbow
Games you can play
6:08 AM (permalink) | Comments (2) | file under: Visualization
The Gates celebrate repetition. Each gate alone was an unremarkable object. Put 7,500 of them together, and they effect a radical change in perception.
The Gates Memory Project is also about repetition, of photographs instead of physical objects. Each collected image has unique traits - time, place, photographer, subject, light - that can be abstracted and appreciated for their membership in a set. When I look at the 2,000 images that have been submitted so far, I'm amazed by the formal games you can play. Photos of the same place, or photos at the same time. Iconic viewing angles. Single gate against blue sky. Saffron fabric against sunshine. Rows of gates receding to a vanishing point. Rows of gates crisscrossing the frame. Gates framing people. Gates framing other gates. Gates photos in a pile ("gatesmemory" at Felix Turners' postcard browser), gates browsable by tag.
How about Gates on a map? Collective memory stimulated by shared activity and a collaborative effort to annotate gatesmemory images by location. I hope that project participants would willing to lend a hand with a widespread spatial annotation project. All it would take would be few interface modifications to Mappr and participants familiar with the park.
I am in the strange position of having never seen Central Park without its saffron makeover, but the reactions of visitors made it clear that it was a changed environment. Our host in New York made a point of leading us through parts that remained ungated, to provide a brief view of the bare park in winter.
Posted by michal migurski
March 14, 2005
the gates and the human figure
5:26 PM (permalink) | Comments (2) | file under: Parody
At its best, parody can uncover the essential truth. These funny send-ups challenge the oft-trumpeted complaint that the Gates were meaningless, insisting on a basic affinity with the human figure (just as classical columns evoke so many Atlases raising the roof). It would be interesting to see this explored in a more serious way.
The photos are:
Posted by ben vershbow
hacking with permission - experimental color picker
12:52 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Visualization
Flickr's philosophy of sharing runs through and through. Not only does it apply to the thousands of photos people have uploaded there, but also to the fundamental building blocks of its unique platform (the API, or the code describing what happens in Flickr and how). Flickr is very open to development, and maintains a sort of approved hack policy - an interesting model for what could be described as semi open source. Take a look at their services page to learn about some of the wonderful Flickr applications people have made simply by shooting a quick proposal to the exceedingly friendly powers that be. One of the best-known examples is Jim Bumgardner's Color Pickr, which resembles a painter's palette, with circular dabs of color in a multitude of shades spinning through the ROYGBIV spectrum. Click a color area, or adjust brightness with a slide bar to the side, and a dozen or so photos right in that sweet spot will arrange themselves around the wheel. The photos are drawn from the color fields photo pool, a page on Flickr assembled by devotees of the project.
As we build this dynamic archive of the Gates, we should survey not only existing visualizations but also the tools we have at our disposal. Color Pickr is an inspiring example of what can be done with the Flickr architecture.
Posted by ben vershbow
March 13, 2005
Image of the Day: Sunday
5:05 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Originally uploaded by the-vorlon.
The landscape framed by Gates.
Posted by kim white
March 12, 2005
image of the day - saturday
4:36 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
texture. Originally uploaded by Thom.
The camera here catches what I don't remember seeing with the naked eye.
Posted by dan visel
March 11, 2005
great Gates parody
6:13 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Parody
Posted by ben vershbow
the Gates through Central Park benches
5:54 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: Image(s) of the Day
Here's my favorite of the day (thanks much to DogFromSPACE..) Reminds me of Charles Demuth's "Figure Five in Gold."
Posted by ben vershbow
March 10, 2005
visualizing the archive
4:04 PM (permalink) | Comments (3) | file under: Visualization
To begin discussing in earnest how we might visualize/organize the archive we are compiling, it seems like a good idea to do a quick survey of existing examples. I mention a few below, but to get this going, please point us to other examples, and comment on what we've mentioned here.
The most stunning visualization we've seen so far is the New York Times interactive feature, The Gates: Christo's New York Moment, designed by Ty Amhad-Taylor. In addition to a four-minute audio review by Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman, the piece provides a fantastic map of the park with three possible views: a basic scheme with dotted lines tracing the path of the Gates, and two aerial photographs, before the Gates and after. Designed as a user's guide for the 16 days when the Gates actually stood, the map includes a legend and corresponding markers for "recommended views," information booths, food, and "warming stations." In a sidebar to the right can be found the entire map in miniature, with a drag-able zoom window. Certain parts of the map contain links to panoramic views. Click these and the screen bisects into a lovely two-panel stack, with an interactive panoramic photo scrolling above the map section. The screenshot I've posted here shows a panoramic image from the Harlem Meer.
The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, has a "virtual tour" of the Gates up on their site - essentially a boring old slideshow, whose one redeeming feature is that it notes very specific geographical locations for each photograph. This suggests the possibility of mapping the archive (Mappr folks, we're hoping you can weigh in on this..).
The last example I'll mention is simply a fun montage program we came across. Plug in "christo" and "gates" and you get something like this. It's worth mentioning because we should keep our eyes open for existing visualizations that could be applied to, or adapted for, our project.
Check out also this post on the Flickr blog about parodies of the Gates. And also this interesting analysis posted on the Flickr Central forum on "the emerging 'genres' when it comes to 'shooting the gates.'"
Again, please comment and refer us to other examples..
Posted by ben vershbow
March 9, 2005
nearly 1,000 photos in just 24 hours!
5:10 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
After just one full revolution of the earth, the Gates Memory Project has amassed almost 1,000 images on its Flickr page. Thanks to all who have submitted so far...
Posted by ben vershbow
The Gates: An Experiment in Collective Memory
1:07 PM (permalink) | Comments (0) | file under: General
So . . . .about two weeks ago I had a dream, (actually more of a nightmare) in which I was asked to judge a contest to choose "the best photograph of the Gates" from among three million orange photos. Over the next few days, however, the more I thought about it,I became intrigued by the idea of seeing people's different creative solutions to photographing the gates.
[Note: I loved the Gates. Ashton (partner-in-crime) and I were in the park almost every day we were in the city, we even gave a party for 150 friends who came from all over the world to walk through the park at dawn (see nifty video by alex itin, orange you glad).
On the last day Ashton and I walked through the park for seven straight hours with Rebeca Mendez and Adam Euwens -- talking almost the whole time about the phenomenon of the Gates -- as an art work that requires significant effort on the part of its audience; like all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, it requires you to be at a certain latitude and longitude at a specific moment in time; you need to see it from different vantage points at different times of the day; as Ashton said, "there are as many views of the Gates as footsteps in the park."
And of course you talk endlessly to the people you meet along the way.
Early that last day, high up on the Harlem Meer, we came upon a big man with red orange hair who was quickly slipping a big coat over his obviously naked body. His friend had just as obviously been taking pictures. Ashton and Rebeca immediately realized that they were taking pictures of his orange pubic hair against the backdrop of the Gates. Impulsively I mentioned that I was planning to sponsor a contest for the best amateur photograph of the Gates. Surprisingly they wrote down a URL for the competition I made up on the spot. A few other times during the day I mentioned this to people who seemed to be taking interesting photos. Without any prompting, they also wrote down the URL.
So the next day, Monday, while sitting around the table with Kim, Dan, and Ben, my colleagues at the Institute for the Future of the Book, I mentioned the whole Gates photo idea and to my delight everyone thought it would fit in perfectly with our experiments in the area of open-ended networked "books."
Voila -- the beginning of the Gates Memory Project which we are launching today at gatesmemory.org. It's quite a bit more ambitious than the original (and impossible) idea of choosing "the best photo." Now we are aiming to to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine -- one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a 
lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. As Ben Vershbow says in the press release announcing the project, "The photographs are a jumping off point for further exploration. Ultimately, we are interested in collecting anything that can be shared over the web - film, audio, text - parodies and remixes."
While the photos and stories are being collected, the institute will encourage discussion and debate on how best to present the archives in hopes of finding new, unexpected ways to view and bring meaning to the content. The institute also welcomes the possibility of collaboration with designers, developers and web curators. This project is the beginning of a long-term exploration for us. Through this work, we are asking: how do we use social software to create works that are in the spirit of the web - i.e. free-form, ad hoc, always evolving, and driven by people's enthusiasm to share - but are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value? It is that tension - between frozen and fluid works - that we aim to explore. We are excited to see the ideas people will bring to the table.
See the complete call for the project HERE.
Posted by bob stein
March 8, 2005
introducing the Gates Memory Project blog
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What are we building? How are we going to build it? How should it be organized? What should it look like?
An integral part of the Gates Memory Project is a public space for discussion of these meta issues. Everyone will have a chance to suggest possible directions and designs for the project. Some will bring technical knowledge to the table. Others will advise more on our conceptual bearings. Others will just come along for the ride. We'll also examine the process of building a work of collective memory in digital space, using the Gates as a pivot point for larger contemplations. How do we use social software (like Flickr) to create works that are in the spirit of the "infinite game" of the web - i.e. free-form, ad hoc, always evolving, and driven by people's enthusiasm to share - but are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value?
It could be argued that the web is itself one enormous collective memory. Like memory, it is in a constant state of growth, transformation and decay. Like memory, it is layered, it sprawls, and is traversed both by brightly lit boulevards and shadowed alleyways. To cope with this enigma, humans have always created works that help fix or focus the memory. An obvious example is a book, painting, photograph, or film. Similarly, in public space, we have museums, memorials, and monuments. Certainly, there was something monumental about the Gates. But while some monuments fix a spike in the earth, as if to say "here it was," others establish a frame, or space, in which memories can move and reverberate. This second sort of monument, much more like the Gates, is a good place to start thinking about what we are trying to build with this project: a work with defined dimensions that still allows for unpredictable movement within, and which, like a great acoustical structure, is designed to resonate.
And of course, the blog will also serve as a forum for discussion of the Gates themselves - their design, their politics, their message, their role in the life of the city, their place in the larger mediascape.. And it will be a place to offer stories and personal meditations on those sixteen days when the Gates stood.
Posted by ben vershbow
