Stephen Willats

Data Stream Portrait of New York - John Kelsey

What it is: Two sets of date collaged to a freestanding wall of sheetrock. The wall zig zags down the entire length of the gallery, dividing it diagonally. One side of the wall represents Delancey Street, a busy, working class thorough-fare located near the gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The other side represents Fifth Avenue in midtown, a tourist destination known for its flagship mega-boutiques, Rockefeller Center, MoMA, etc. Each of these two streets is observed and filtered via a series of 10 'channels' of information: facial expressions, subjective impressions, spaces between bodies, people and objects, signs of determination, signs of resistance, ambient sound, objects left behind, signs of nature, and fabric of the environment. This information has been organised into a system of columns and rows. The vertical columns represent sequential moments in time and space across the 10 horizontal columns. Read left to right, the 10-channel data streams progress on foot through New York space-time, producing a diagrammatic portrait of the city that echoes the grid of its plan.