Re-curating the city : accessories for a new tourism of New York

Abstract

This thesis poses a challenge to normal modes of experiencing and representing the spaces of tourism: that is to say, it proposes new ways of touring space. Although this project was initially conceived as a critique of tourism from a social and political standpoint, the project increasingly turned towards the abstract, as it became more evident that the only way to alter the established paradigms of touring space was to approach these both (tourism and the reception of space) through their two lowest common denominators: namely, the act of walking and the act of seeing. Only if these two acts were somehow re-envisioned could tourism itself be potentially freed up from the well-known "traps" through which it alters, demeans, or destroys the very object of its attraction. This project posits the production of tourism as a sort of curatorship enacted collectively by urban planners, architects, local businesses, local governments, and those who market tourism through books, guides, and maps. Accepting that tourism is necessarily a curated experience to some degree, I began to explore the possibility of devices that altered the accepted ways of walking and seeing the city so that they confounded our very notions of what it means to tour space. These devices take the form of video camera attachments that serve as "portable museums" reframing one's experience of the city though this recorded analog that creates new views, relationships, and erasures of the city's structure.