I just was tipped off to another project engaging the colors and the city called “Colors of New York City.” A group of artists throughout the five boroughs are working together on the project that describes itself as:

An Exhibit and Performance Depicting the Colored Harmonies of a City: The event is a meditation on the meaning of “color,” revolving around four puns on the notion of color – skin, objects, emotions and media. Rather than address directly the changing perceptions of race, skin color is explored as an instance (among many) of color in today’s cities. The exhibit promotes a dynamic understanding of color and of race through photographs, audio recordings, films and poetry.

The performance forces artists (and audiences!) to explore their homes, their communities, their neigborhoods and to document the COLORS found there. The inquiry includes the following New York City hoods: Bensonhurst, Flushing, Fort Green, Harlem, South Bronx, Staten Island and Washington Heights. It also delves into racist conceptions of “beauty” through an examination of “ethnic hair” in New York City.

The opening and performance is on Wednesday night at Chashama, 217 East 42nd Street, from 5 - 9 pm. I will definitely check it out.

info@stadtblind.org

Stadtblind Cambridge Jesse Shapins _ cambridge@stadtblind.org

Stadtblind Innsbruck Celia Di Pauli _ innsbruck@stadtblind.org T +43.650.9496978

Stadtblind Stuttgart Philipp Schwarz _ stuttgart@stadtblind.org T +49.177.3431742

“Sound-Seeker is a map that privileges the ear over the eye. The project reaches across the city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive.” www.soundseeker.org

Andrea Polli, along with the NYSoundmap project and The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology, created this wonderful collaborative sound map of the city. The project asks users to document sounds throughout NYC and plot them on a map. We’re exploring a similar collaborative approach to sound gathering for the Colors of New York, with a different style of documentary-based mapping. Instead of mapping sounds to specific locations in the city, we’re interested in mapping sounds to a color palette.