THE HIGH LINE- Plotting NYC  
  Commissioned to study Chelsea's elevated railway, better known as the
High Line, this website experiments with alternative documents to those master plans and perspectives typically used by planners to convey "vision" for the city. Assuming that vision might be stored in other dimensions and other specific species of information, the site communicates explicit ingredients and instructions for spaces and programs, but it argues that, in the city, these must always enter into a skeletal and somewhat less predictable mix than the planner had hoped. Whatever the fate of the High Line, this site is a machine for generating spatial scenarios and narratives about a specific portion of this city.

Entering the site is like entering a story, a highly integrated story
that quickly shifts between several environments. Adventure stories,
glamorous spy thrillers or murder mysteries often propel the story by
continually causing it to exit itself. The character leaves one
system or environment and is deposited into another. Information or
motive from one system causes changes in another. Finally the
pleasure is in linking the environments after the fact through a
series of events rather than expositions. Shifts between the
environments are abrupt and comedic. Some shifts are scripted as
trap doors between worlds. Most are authored by the user. The final
document is the user's narrative as printed from the text box of each
session.

The web site makes of the high line a celebrity or an object of
desire. It is alive, intriguing, sexy, provocative, funny,
adventurous, irreverent, beautiful, aloof, popular and honest.

One of the four worlds is registered in planimetric property
allocations and legal rights of way. The background character is a
beleaguered developer who is constantly begging for public subsidies.
The object of the game is to help the suffering developer. Making
deals and affiliations improves the health and well-being of the
developer which, like a tamagachi, is monitored in the text box.

Another environment, using panoramic photographs, travels along the
length of the high line at the upper and lower level. Rather than a
planimetric registration of information, it records information in
surface, surface activated by touch. The background character is
another species, an unidentified hybrid animal, something like a
cross between a bird and a dog whose howls and chirps are heard at
intervals. Touching some buildings triggers eccentric details and
opinionated comments to appear in text box, as spoken by this
creature who is suspicious of all those "not provided with tails."

The third environment is a game of "Trap." The background character
is that of a tourist looking for opportunities or spatial conditions
that resemble other global landmarks or tourist experiences. For
every opportunity found a souvenir appears on the screen. The text
box provides the tourist with information about how to appreciate the
complement of choregraphed events while also tabulating revenues
generated.

The fourth environment portrays the high line as a party rather than
a physical site. It is a set political associations that boosts the
careers of all of those involved. Various contigencies interested in
the high line pass across the screen like schools of fish. The user
herds the guests and activates quotations from some members of each
group. These quotes appear in the text box.

 
  A project of the Design Trust with Friends of the High Line  
     
  CREDITS:  
  Design Fellow- Keller Easterling  
  Website Team- Keller Easterling, Phu Hoang, Seiichi Saito  
  Special Thanks to Casey Jones (Design Fellow, Design Trust for Public Space), Robert Hammond and Joshua David (Friends of the High Line).  
     
 

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