NEW YORK -- Our neighborhoods are more than the buildings we live in, or the people we pass every day on the street. Artist Shimon Attie is using technology to make visible the unseen landscapes of the places we call home -- our memories, histories, and dreams.
Attie's latest project, Between Dreams and History, premieres Thursday night at the intersection of Ludlow and Rivington streets on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Two years in the making, the installation is the product of extensive technical research and development, and hundreds of interviews that Attie conducted with residents of the funky, lively, cross-cultural neighborhood. Between Dreams and History will continue there until 14 November.
A sophisticated array of computer-aimed lasers will project excerpts from those interviews on walls and storefronts, inscribing the residents' memories and dreams in Chinese, Yiddish, English, and Spanish.
After soaking up tales of the neighborhood from Dominican schoolgirls, elderly Jews, and Chinese t'ai ch'i practitioners, Attie says, "I wanted the project to be their long arms, to give visual form to their memories, and use their handwriting to give presence to something that's immaterial and ethereal."
The lasers work like the scanning beam in a TV set, and the texts will appear on the buildings at night, letter by letter, as if a ghostly hand were writing them. It was this effect that took a year to perfect, Attie says. The project is sponsored by Creative Time, a 25-year-old arts organization that encourages artists to experiment with new media and challenging content in public spaces.
Attie says his hope for the project was to "encourage a more meaningful and richly textured sense of place" for residents and visitors, and to "open up more room and opportunity to reflect" in the in-your-face cityscape.
The questions that Attie asked residents ranged from "What is your first memory of the neighborhood?" to "What was your favorite childhood song?"
Dreams, poems, superstitions, and a rabbi's speculations about the afterlife all found their way into the exhibit, creating a composite portrait of the interior lives of the denizens of the bodegas, street corners, and synagogues in this part of New York City.
A space on the Web for viewers all over the world to contribute their own neighborhood lore will launch Monday.
Attie was amazed, he says, when he found high levels of correspondence between the kinds of imagery that would arise from different interviews.
"An 80-year-old Chinese resident's memory would relate to a 15-year-old Dominican's anxiety dream, which related to a Yiddish folk song. There was a weaving back and forth of the straightforward recollections and material from the imagination."
Liz Sevcenko, a community organizer who acted as a liaison with residents, says an added dimension of the project was to restore a place in history for some of the people who are left out of popular images of the neighborhood.
"The Lower East Side is represented in folklore as this European community -- pushcarts, primarily Jewish," she observes. "The fact is that Latinos, Puerto Ricans, and people from all of the republics of China have been here since the 19th century. This project gives these other communities their place in the collective memory."
The making of the project was filmed for a documentary.
Attie lived in Europe for several years. An earlier installation was inspired by a series of archival photographs illustrating Jewish life in Berlin before the Holocaust. By projecting the photographs onto the locations in the same city where they were taken a half-century earlier, Attie was able to resurrect in place -- if only in pictorial form -- a way of life the Nazis had obliterated.
Attie, who is both Jewish and gay, says that "memory is about loss." By belonging to "two different peoples who have experienced a lot of loss," Attie says, he is especially interested in the persistence of the past in the present.
The technical adviser for the current project was Norman Ballard, who has worked with video-art pioneer Nam June Paik and Laurie Anderson, and designed the flamethrowers for the current Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. Between Dreams and History was financed, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Creative Time's executive director, Anne Pasternak, says Attie's project was selected because it is "visually stunning, deeply thoughtful, and sensitive."
Pasternak criticized "ill-directed" art projects in new media that are more about showy technology than art.
"Between Dreams and History is about an artist's vision. The technology is just the most vivid way possible to realize it," she said.
