Dr.
Lev Manovich is one the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide,
and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of
contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of ten books
including Cultural Analytics (forthcoming), Instagram and Contemporary Image, Data Drift, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media.
"Lev
Manovich is the only media theorist around who is talking not just
about what computers do but how they do it" - Ellen Lupton, curator of
contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, NYC.
ON BROADWAY
The interactive installation On Broadway represents life in the 21st century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan.
The result is a new type of city view, created from the activities of hundreds of thousands of people.
The whole project was focued on one street of NYC – Broadway. Broadway runs through the middle of Manhattan Island curving along its way. What happened was they selected points at 30 meter
intervals going through the center of Broadway, and made 100 meter wide
slices centered on every point. The result of this is a spine-like
shape that is 21,390 meters long and 100 meters wide. They used the
coordinates of this shape to filter the data obtained for all of NYC.
Instagram
images and their locations, time, tags, descriptions and so on were
downloaded in Manovich's lab in real time for over 158 days in 2014.
Image and data include 660,000 Instagram photos shared along Broadway
during six months in 2014. They also used the same technique to gather
images and data from Foursquare, Twitter, Taxi's and Income.
INSTALLATION
The result of our explorations is On Broadway:
a visually rich image-centric interface, where numbers play only a
secondary role, and no maps are used. The project proposes a new visual
metaphor for thinking about the city: a vertical stack of image and data
layers.
There
are 13 such layers in the project, all aligned to locations along
Broadway. As you move along the street, you see a selection of Instagram
photos from each area, left, right, and top Google Street View images
and extracted top colors from these image sources.
We
also show average numbers of taxi pickups and drop-offs, Twitter posts
with images, and average income for the parts of the city crossed by
Broadway. To help with navigation, we added additional layers showing
names of Manhattan neighborhoods crossed by Broadway, cross-streets and
landmarks.
