NYSee

(2006) - NYSee was a 5 year side project that began long before Google Maps launched Street View. In fact, it was publicly displayed just one year before Google pretty much made this project irrelevant. But the body of work remains, and the entirety of it was done solely on my own.

The crazy idea back in the year 2001 was to videotape every single street in Manhattan, and construct a program to allow a user to turn at any intersection within each video. Underestimation occured at practically every step, but at each point, I'd just gone too far to quit.

Planning a meticulous route that would take me through every single street of Manhattan and building a custom camera mount that I could rig up to whatever rental car I got took me a year to complete. It all paid off in the actual filming part which surprisingly took me only 10 days. That's 10 days where I covered the whole city, every street, in every legal direction, including all highway on and off ramps and every bridge and tunnel in and out of Manhattan save the Cross Bronx Expressway which I scrapped dues to its complexity and exhaustion from 10 days of 8 hour non-stop driving.

Over 4000 hours of video then had to be transferred to hard drive, all through a single mini-dv deck, one tape at a time. The biggest task actually came next, and that was to edit the frames of every single street so that playing it would move down the street at a continous pace, no slowing down for lights or acceleration from stops. This took me 3 entire years, all in spare time. No fancy editing environment. Just Quicktime Pro, copying and pasting frames like stop-motion. Without a ShuttlePro, this probably would've taken me twice as long.

Once I had all the final edited video, I pulled it all together in Macromedia Director with a custom database, embedded map built in Flash which communicated with the core Director program to follow along with the video, and various audio clips matched with the level of traffic in each frame to enhance the experience.

The design left something to be desired, but I was happy just to get it working, and I barely got it finished in time to be accepted into Ars Electronica 2006, the annual festival of art and technology held in Linz, Austria.