-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

A “skyscraper showdown” is in headlines this week, making contentious building projects a recurring theme for the summer. This time we have 15 Penn Plaza vs. the Empire State Building. The City Council has approved plans for a 67-story tower to be built two blocks away from, and just 34 feet shorter than, the iconic Empire State Building. Detractors claim New York’s skyline will be ruined and views of the city’s most recognizable structure will be obstructed, and the sole councilperson to vote against the project, Charles Barron, dissented due to what he saw as an insufficient number of contracts set aside for minority and women-owned businesses; supporters point to job creation, economic development, and the constant growth and change intrinsic to our fair city. Meanwhile, Brian Lehrer asks how this hasn’t come up before and over on Co.Design, Ken Carbone offers up a few alternative ways for the structure to stake its claim on the skyline.

It’s no surprise, thanks to the dysfunctions of Albany and the (many) gubernatorial scandals of recent years, that this year’s candidates for Governor of New York are promising reform and change. But on one topic of great concern to the NYC metropolitan area in particular, public transit and the extraordinary debt faced by the MTA, the candidates’ platforms are unclear. In an op-ed in the Albany Times Union, John Petro and Dan Morris of the Drum Major Institute point to Albany and the state government’s inadequate investment in public transit as a primary cause of the MTA’s now-spiraling deficits and they call on the candidates to clarify their platforms and voice their ideas. In the words of Petro and Morris, “Our public transit system is an irreplaceable asset and an invaluable part of the nation’s infrastructure that should be protected. Leaders in state government better start treating it that way.”

Early last year we talked to Colleen Werthmann and Michael Premo, two of the minds behind Brooklyn at Eye Level, a theater performance with a journalistic approach that explored all aspects of and viewpoints on Atlantic Yards. This fall, the investigative theater company The Civilians is updating the material gathered for that production to present In the Footprint. Again bringing interviews and documentation about the development to the stage through dance, music and spoken word, The Civilians offer a multifaceted portrait of a complex project. In the Footprint will run from November 12 through December 11, 2010 at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy has released its latest video, produced by a group of students from Brooklyn’s Walt Whitman Middle School who ask: Why are there so many empty lots in our neighborhood? The Good, the Bad, and the Empty, which premiered on Places this week, takes us on a vacant lot tour of Flatbush and follows the students as they question local residents, landowners, community activists, and city officials about the existing conditions of the unused lots and why they were left dormant in the first place. The students find everything from trash-strewn, abandoned “construction sites” to well-tended community gardens, and share their ideas to activate these vacant, underutilized spaces.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

“How come it’s easier to find fresh fruits and vegetables in Brooklyn Heights than in the South Bronx?” To answer this question and others, our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy worked with local high school students at New Settlement’s Bronx Helpers to produce a 29-minute video that will become available later this month via the organization’s website. Click here to pre-order a copy. Today, our other friends at the journal Places offer an advanced premiere of the video and a thoughtful introduction to CUP’s work (some of which you’ve read about right here on the Omnibus). See Places‘ post to enjoy the video.

Here’s what Places‘ editor Nancy Levinson has to say about this fantastic project:

Where does the food in your bodega – or the corner grocer, the local minimart – come from? Who decides whether to stock tortilla chips or salad greens, and how much they’ll cost? How come it’s easier to find fresh fruits and vegetables in Brooklyn Heights than in the South Bronx? What’s the connection between the incidence of diabetes and the food market supply chain?

Last year, the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy set out to answer these questions, and the result is Bodega Down Bronx, a 29-minute video created by CUP staff in collaboration with local high school students at New Settlement’s Bronx Helpers, a service learning organization focused on civic engagement.

Part of CUP’s Urban Investigations program, which asks basic questions about how cities work, Bodega Down Bronx delves into the politics and players of New York’s network of bodegas. Under the direction of CUP teaching artist Jonathan Bogarín, and working with CUP staff Valeria Mogilevich and Rosten Woo, and intern Sarah Nelson Wright, the student filmmakers researched issues, visited sites, storyboarded scenes, produced props and sets, and conducted interviews. They took their video equipment and question lists to store owners, wholesalers, distributors, drivers, and customers young and old. They met with nutrition professors and diabetes counselors, and with U.S. congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, who sponsored H.R. 5952, the Bodegas as Catalysts for Healthy Living Act (which would have provided grants to bodega owners to install refrigerated cases to stock more perishable produce). Along the way they teased out the cause-and-effect of food cultures, the self-reinforcing cycles (and stereotypes) that have turned some urban neighborhoods into so-called food deserts. Do bodegas stock a lot of snack food because that’s what their customers want, or do customers reach for the BBQ-flavored crisps because that’s what’s available at the bodega?

Like all CUP projects, Bodega Down Bronx is inspired by the conviction that cities and their complex systems and politics can be made legible and transparent — and more, that this transparency is vital for democratic society.

And while you’re over at Places site, check out the wealth of excellent material, including Omni-editor Andrew Blum’s thoughtful essay on two landscape architecture projects by Michael van Valkenburgh and Associates.


Photo by Dan Wiley.

Not too long ago we introduced you to a new project conceived by Omni-collaborator Jesse Shapins and a group of dedicated media artists – namely Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns – called Mapping Main Street. Well, several thousand miles later, the team has built an expansive and flexible online platform for a collaborative documentary media project that will eventually provide a vision of America unlike any we’ve seen before. Users from across the country have contributed photos via Flickr, and audio and video content via Vimeo. The only requirement is that all media “must be recorded on a street named Main.”

Over 400 hundred Main Streets have been documented so far. Which leaves about 10,000 to go. Get involved; each borough of New York has a Main Street. Brooklyn’s got a two-block long stretch in Fulton Ferry. In the Bronx, Main Street is a tiny residential lane near Locust Point and the Throg’s Neck Bridge. In Staten Island, Main Street runs across the southern tip of the island from Tottenville to Conference House Park. Roosevelt Island, weirdly, has a couple different Main Streets. There’s even one on Governors Island. And then there is the fabled subject of this week’s feature: the Main Street that’s the bustling terminus of the 7 train and the central commercial spine of Flushing, Queens.

We recently caught up with Jesse and Kara to talk about the project and where it fits into a constellation of issues including new challenges to political rhetoric, new directions in media production, and new lessons for urban planning and design.

The project was conceived last year in the context of the election. As an image of Main Street was being bandied about by politicians (often as a foil to Wall Street), the team was struck that the reductiveness of such political imagery goes unchallenged and is perpetuated by the media. Main Street is not, in Jesse’s words, “some abstract, general place; there’s a street named Main in almost every city and town across the nation!” So they went about setting up a way for citizens to complicate the presumptions that the image of Main Street, USA provides an accurate shorthand for a certain set of uniform values, economic interests and political opinions. The project’s goal is not to redefine the image of Main Street, but rather “to suggest a critical attitude toward the language and rhetoric around you.”

Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members. It just might also suggest a critical attitude toward conventional attempts to identify community priorities around such often contentious issues as growth, change, context, preservation and development. Jesse notes that “since the 1960s, since the rise of advocacy planning and its critique of modernist planning, there has been a strong emphasis on democratic and participatory processes.” But these structures have, for the most part, “emphasized deliberative decision-making, rather than expressions of experience or identity. Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members or stakeholders.” And indeed, some communities out there are starting to use collaborative media production to inform policy goals. Case in point: Starksboro, Vermont, where an artist-in-residence assembled a team of students (elementary through college) to use the arts to draw the community into a conversation about the town’s future and support efforts to create a masterplan.

And the production of the media itself has broader applications. Schools, youth programs and local radio stations across the country have been getting in on the action, encouraging participation in the Mapping Main Street project both as a way to build storytelling skills and also to get youth to engage more deeply with place. The four portraits of Flushing’s Main Street below were produced by high school students from the East-West School of International Studies and the Frank Sinatra High School for the Performing Arts as part of WNYC’s Radio Rookies program. Over the next three years, the Mapping Main Street Project will roll out a distributed production model, partnering with a wide variety of NPR affiliates and educational institutions to document every single Main Street in the country. But while infrastructure to support that effort begins to develop, the first phase – producing the participatory platform, setting the tone and getting the word out – will conclude with an exhibition created with Red Antenna (which just happens to be the creative agency that designed and developed urbanomnibus.net) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago early next year as a part of the Third Coast Filmless Festival. Just as the website enables thematic relationships between Main Streets to emerge – in addition to the geographic relationships – the exhibit is certain to make manifest the elegance of the Mapping Main Street project: to infuse a cliché with all the contradictions and diversity of America itself.

And that diversity, of course, isn’t just apparent among small towns in different parts of the country. Big cities, like ours, have them too. And sometimes, as in the case of Flushing, Queens, street names harken back to a time when outer borough villages were independent of the growing metropolis that would eventually subsume them. Flushing, in fact, was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island way back in 1645. It was the site, according to New York City historian Kenneth Jackson, of the birthplace of religious tolerance by decree in America. These days, the neighborhood is more commonly associated with Queens’ incredible ethnic diversity and large foreign-born population. Flushing’s Chinatown “now rivals [Manhattan's] Chinatown as a center of Chinese-American business and political might, as well as culture and cuisine” according to the Times’ Kirk Semple. It’s a place of steam buns, old movie theaters, ethnic perceptions and interactions, and some particularly intriguing (and dapper) characters. -C.S.

Steam Buns ‘R’ Us from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Main Street Cinemas from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Culture Talk from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Searching For Main Street’s Flushing Pimp from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Mapping Main Street is created by James Burns, Ann Heppermann, Kara Oehler, and Jesse Shapins. Production help from Ian Gray, Josie Holtzman, Sara Pellegrini and Baughman Reinhardt. The project features new original songs by High Places, Chain and the Gang, Jason Cady and The Hive Dwellers. Radio Rookie Short Wave stories in Flushing, Queens are reported by Tracy Leon, Edwin Llanos, Rachel Temkin, Helen Peng, Andrea Torres, Rayon Wright, Alexis Gordon, Hawa Lee and Melissa Best and produced by the Mapping Main Street team with Sanda Htyte and Veralyn Williams. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.

The first phase of the project is produced through the generous funding of Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative between the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and KUOW’s Program Venture Fund. All broadcast radio stories aired on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

Remember when Jesse Shapins and Brian House showed us how citizens of all stripes could magically morph into “critical media artists,” using a handy little experiential dictionary as a point of departure? Well now Jesse has teamed up with Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns and the team has focused their collaborative documentary efforts on that most ubiquitous of place names – one often evoked by moose-hunting culture warriors and erstwhile vice-presidential candidates – Main Street. This just in: the Main Streets of America are as various as the country itself. In fact, the central places in our cities and town might be as good a place as any to showcase our country’s baffling internal diversity. Check out the new website they just launched and then read on below as they announce, in their own words, a bunch of fantastic media corollaries.

NPR Weekend Edition Series
As part of the project, we’re producing a series on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Our first story was about Chattanooga, TN, where part of Main Street is a prostitution strip. Our second story explored San Luis, AZ, where Main Street is a border crossing. This Saturday, tune in to Weekend Edition, where we’ll raft under Main Street in Lewistown, MT. (Check out NPR.org to see when you can hear the show on your local member station.)

Mapping Main Street Songs
We’ve also commissioned four musicians to create original songs based on actual Main Streets. Listen to songs by:

A Collaborative Documentary Media Project
Mapping Main Street is an experiment in the new genre of collaborative documentary media. Anyone can contribute to this project. The only requirement is that all photos and videos must be taken on a street named Main. You can explore this interactive documentary on our website www.mappingmainstreet.org. Already, hundreds of people have contributed photos and videos from more than 400 Main Streets in all 50 states. The site is organized around geographical and thematic routes. We think some of the most interesting are:

Upcoming
This is just the first phase of the project. Now, we’re currently working with WNYC’s Radio Rookies Short Wave on a workshop to produce radio stories and take photos on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. And this winter, we’ll be journeying along the Main Streets of the Puget Sound region to produce stories and interactive features for KUOW’s Program Venture Fund, along with special experimental pieces for PRX’s Remix Radio Sirius stream.

Mapping Main Street is produced through the generous funding of MQ2, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Inc. with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.