WRITTEN RESPONSE

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Jessica Mengyuan Sun / Unit 1 Method of Investigating

Considering my enforced quarantine as an opportunity of unique findings, this critical investigation project is conducted from my street-facing quarantine room and long walks around the surrounding neighborhood. The focused location,11 Long Street, is an internal road in close proximity to Columbia flower market. This area is recognized as a multiracial resistance of high density. 

Employing similar methods as Perec (1997) of spectating and note taking in extended time span, the project comes to various observations towards this particular block’s ecosystem. Key findings include wide difference in architecture’s appearance(concrete vs. bricks, clean vs. heavily graffitied) and the routine of delivery truck and bike riders which make up most of the live traffic. The project farther investigated the building surfaces by filming and collecting. A digital mapping mock-up is developed to represent their correlation. A series of various door fronts is photographed and sorted in attempt to draw self-reflexive observation from. By collecting delivery records from my building’s dwellers and mapping it out, I takes notice that the buildings established with various purposed as office spaces, group relocation, student accommodations are connected by a network of door-to-door delivery. As arguably a new form of city infrastructure, the delivery network also “runs ‘underneath’ actual structures … that upon which something else rides, or works, a platform of sorts.” (Places Journal, 2013) 

In the process of contextualized my investigation process facing the same challenge of “making some process perceptible,” I was much inspired by criticism towards conventional map by the artist-academic Emily Eliza Scott. Scott (Places Journal, 2013) argues “disrupt coherent representations of space, simultaneously highlighting the fragmentary nature of knowledge itself and critiquing, for instance, the God’s-eye view inherent to traditional maps.” As a response the project final created a multi-dimensional juxtaposition of building surfaces and the dwellers life activities by folding up delivery boxes and superimpose collected recordings onto the mockup’s blocky surfaces representing Long Street’s concentrated building structure. 

In consideration for farther develop this project, investigative methods involving extended variety of sense as the “odd but distinctive mix of industrial-strength air-conditioners and the ozone” smell of internet or the “clanging pipes or a stuttering computer hard drive” sound that could be used as diagnose tool. Recording and noting down difference in volume level in front different doorways in Hackney could open opportunity for more critical findings.

Reference:

Perec, G. (1997) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Books.

Places Journal (2013) Infrastructural Tourism. Available at: https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/?cn-reloaded=1 (24 October 2021).