Rolf and I partnered up to check out the technology as well as the floating island. Due to the fact that I had to make a presentation to the Applications class this week, I let Rolf pick the technology. He suggested the Roosevelt Island tramway, which I thought was a great idea. I had never taken the tram nor gone to Roosevelt Island for that matter. Not only was it in keeping with the island theme, the tram positioned us perfectly to see the Robert Smithson piece.

I met Rolf at the Manhattan base of the tram early Saturday morning. We took a few photos from street level. Rolf experimented with his camera (which he’d checked out from the ER.) I had my own: a trusty Nikon Coolpix 3100. Rolf had a little difficulty figuring out the features on his camera, but this was most likely caused by his unfamiliarity with the apparatus. I keep my camera on the auto settings for most cases and usually get fine results.

To access the tram, we crossed a small plaza to the station. After climbing a flight of steps, we reached a platform. There was a window at the top of the staircase showcasing the mechanism that propels the tram above and across the river. We could see not only the giant cast iron wheels and the steel cable, but also the various other subsystems that help guide the cable around the wheels.

The tram is operated as part of the metro system, so a metro pass is needed to board. As I made my way through the turnstyle my card was rejected due to lack of funds. This is something that has always bothered me abought this metro system. There is no way of looking at a metro pass card to decipher the value remaining on it. When a rider purchases a $10 metro card, the pass allows entry into the system six times. It is up to the rider to mentally deduct the times the pass was used in order to anticipate the need to purchase a new one. If the rider loses track, he or she is faced with two options: the first and seemingly most popular, is to go for broke and try the ticket as one attempts to enter the subway system. This is a dangerous proposition in a busy station, particularly when there is a line of angry commuters piling up instantly behind anyone unlucky enough to have lost this gamble. The second option is to search out a card reader in some remote and random location in the station, say a quick prayer to the gods of transportation that the card reader might actually be functioning, then slide the pass through to see if it has any value.

Another little bit of technology that annoyed me was my experience with my camera’s batteries. They died on me when I was attempting the greatest shot of all time. Of course, I’d had ample warning, both through the camera’s graphical interface as well as through its behavior. It was also irritating dealing with flickr.com, yahoo.com and all the new passwords I had to develop (I think that I have about a dozen new ones since beginning ITP.)

But the metro pass thing really gets to me. There’s got to be a better way.


Photos can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/taitpcomlab/

This has become a rather frustrating exercise. The site is up, but it's not quite as I had hoped.

The adress is: www.itp.nyu.edu/~tra225/

The site should look something like the above image, but depending on your browser, it might look rather different. This was a bit of a shock. I had taken a lot of time to figure out all the code to create alignment and positioning, only to see it completely ignored by Firefox (see image below). It looks perfect on Explorer 5.2 for Mac (yay!), and almost perfect on Explorer 6.0 on the pc.



I think that my problems arise from my use of "absolute" values in my CSS. Not really sure, it's just a guess.

I also failed to figure out how to create text as links without html placing an underline under the type. Another odd thing in my code is that I don't have anything in the "body", all my stuff is in the header tags. The site still works, but not using the body tags might make it less versatile, especially if I wanted to replace the images with text.

Here is the code for the site:

HTML:

title>TA's Portfolio /title>
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
link href="two.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
/head>
body>
/body>
h1>Terence Arjo/h1>
h2>Images from California/h2>
h3>_/img>_/h3>
h5>_a href="page2.html"_next_/a>_/h5>
h6>to get to arjodesign.com click _a href="http://www.arjodesign.com">here_/a>_/h6>

CSS:

body { background-color: #FFFFFF;
background-image: url(background-image-2.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 60px 50px;
}

a {
color: #660000;
font: normal 14px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}


h1, {
color: #000033;
font: normal 24px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
position: absolute;
left: 85px;
top: 65px;
}

h2, {
color: #1D9CD1;
font: normal 20px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
position: absolute;
left: 420px;
top: 65px;
}

h3, {
position: absolute;
left: 200px;
top: 130px;
}

h4, {
color: #660000;
left: 200px;
top: 400px;
position: absolute;
}
h5, {
color: #660000;
left: 492px;
top: 400px;
position: absolute;
}

h6, {
color: 000000;
left: 492px;
top: 455px;
position: absolute;

Janet Cardiff - Her long black hair

Wow, that was quite an interesting experience. I initially expected to be led through a story centered on the woman with the long black hair, an audio tour incorporating the park, the city as well as the provided props. While there was a bit of a narrative, the story provided a base for Ms. Cardiff's musings. As she guided me on the walk, she noted some of the park's features and history in addition to allowing herself to wonder out loud. The effect was much like taking a stroll with a friend who, in the course of telling you a long story, is occasionally interrupted. The odd thing was that some of the things she paused to note weren't actually there. It was uncanny when her timing was spot-on--for instance, when she nudged me to take the right trail at a fork in the path.

At the beginning of the walk, one of the first things she mentions is that one has to become adjusted to the "symphony" of sounds in the city, or one will be driven mad by its constant onslaught. Her voice and the atmospheric sounds she added (sirens, people talking, footsteps, etc) focused my attention on the city itself, often causing me to jump or look over my shoulder. There were times when it felt like I was being followed, others where I was alone in my soundscape. I found it interesting that the sounds she highlighted were sounds I might otherwise have tuned out. She also used samples to add emphasis and atmosphere--a bit of brass band, the sound of gun shots in the distance--to her narrative. She also included a few musical pieces that directly related to the story, which I found distracting because they broke the spell I was under.

The packet of photos that accompanied the audio served as a means for Ms. Cardiff to examine various themes, relationships, the idea of the passing of time, the permanence of things as well as their continual change. The second photo was of a pond, taken in winter, which we were to compare with the actual pond before us. She described the day it was taken, how cold and how deserted the park was that day, a stark contrast to the summertime Central Park on the day of my visit. The image of the pond with ice on it, snow on the ground and the bare trees contrasted vividly with the lush green of the duckweed on the water and the canopy of leaves above me.

The photos were also used to examine the relationship between the black-haired woman and the photographer. Ms. Cardiff inferred that they were an unhappy couple, because one half of the pair was never in the images, but always behind the camera. The woman with the long black hair certainly didn't look happy in any of the images. One photo was snapped before the subject was ready, and the picture caught her brushing hair away from her face. Why did she look so unhappy? Why was the photographer so impatient? Couldn't a stranger in the park be trusted with their camera long enough to take a photo of the two of them together? Ms. Cardiff compared the woman with the long black hair and her photographer to Orpheus and Eurydice, adding a romantic/tragic element to the narrative. Perhaps this explained the source of some of the sorrow captured in the story? Like the Mona Lisa's smile, the story of the woman with the long black hair is intriguing and filled with unanswered questions. Ms. Cardiff takes the painting a few steps further by immersing us in the woman's world, and making us experience her real or imagined life.