many innovations in cartography have happened around Manhattan (my friend Jack Schulze has just delivered one of the latest). Yet Gissen says that “no maps tell you what it feels like”. He means ‘feel’ as in environmental quality (rather than say accretion and dynamics of cultural capital, which is just as difficult to map in NYC, despite what some might claim.) In terms of the environmental quality of Manhattan, Gissen reckons that due to air conditioning “more indoor air was produced in this space than anywhere on Earth (until recently, possibly).”
Similarly, Gissen describes a project for Pittsburgh, to “make Pittsburghians think about how the space has changed”. To understand the history of the city through the history of the air of the city. Particularly where “the air that’s been in the city is really quite foul.” Gissen asks “What if you just projected the atmosphere that used to be in the city?” He shows an illustration, looking akin to a Superstudio project, but made out of smoke. He then decided to make “a less utopian image” (less heroically Superstudio, in that sense) and showed a progression that’s “like a balloon that’s made of smoke (to indicate that it’s) actually a really positive sign. It makes you realise how the city has transformed, (and how) the atmosphere is designed in a way that’s different from the one that was there before.” Hence, an idea for an air conditioning map of Manhattan. Gissen’s interested in the work of Philippe Raum or Francois Roche - “or those that work with atmosphere”. “How does their work get preserved? You can’t photograph it. Why not have an archive in which the actual chemical content is preserved?”
Gissen then shows another project .. “to reconstruct floating bathhouses in the Hudson” (and thus addressing water quality), and another, centred around a chance to explore the history of the park. His proposal here was to create “a history of the park in which the park doesn’t exist.” So it’s “a proposal to do a counter-history of New York in which the parks in the park system never happened. It makes people understand the history of the city differently …” (These are all interesting variations on these theme of highlighting what is not there - what in other areas we might say are ‘making the invisible visible’ strategies - but here dealing with the creation of alternate pasts or alternate presents, in order to highlight the difference something has made. Either the difference from removal (pollution) or addition (parks).) Gissen shows a map of Midtown Manhattan from the air, noting that
Having started with Nietzsche, Gissen closes with an anecdote about his next door neighbour’s parrot. After many days of suffering the parrot’s incessant screeching, Gissen eventually realised that the parrot was imitating the sounds around their neighbourhood. It would squawk the buses’ brakes, or imitate the sound of washing up, and so on. Gissen sees the “parrot is a type of architectural and living archive” of his neighbourhood. He then speculates further, noting that some parrots might travel through war-zones, picking up the sounds they hear there. “So their song is of urban and social destruction,” he says. They end up in zoos, singing a song of distant conflict. He says when we look at “the way that non-human life can be used as an archive, we consider the way that the social, natural and historical can not easily be divided …” In the Q&A, Geoff recalls the Duchamp piece 2cc of Paris air indicating it reminds him of Gissen’s approach, and wonders aloud about what the limits of preservation might be. Can we ‘preserve’ the Iraq war, or a traffic jam on the ‘10’ here in LA? Gissen says you can reconstruct anything - but preservation has its limits.