Abstract

New York, the City of Babylon

Min Hyang Kim

New York is like the city of Babylon, the center of the ancient empire where the Tower of Babel was built. I'm planning to make an experimental presentation of ethnographic images of souls in Manhattan in 2005-2007 with soundscape. I took thousands of photographs on the streets of Manhattan in 2005-2007. Most of them are black and white images and taken in downtown Manhattan. They are the records of moments of daily lives of various kinds of people in downtown Manhattan, including a black homeless man that I became friends with, a local cafe waitress working long hours, and many anonymous people working on the street or under street or just passing. I wanted to capture the souls and spirits of the city.

The presentation will be experimental in terms of having no grand narrative. As the mode of reception in the city is, it will be a montage/collage of the fragmented images with texts but designed to run toward building up some kind of sentiment to experience how it is like living in Manhattan. The texts are about the subjects, city and life there. The soundscape of Manhattan will be accompanied. The soundscape will not subordinated to the images but be equally leading the presentation. The soundscape will reveal the acoustic environment of the city with keynote sounds, sound objects, sound signals and soundmarks. Partially at some critical points, documentary fragments shot on the street, abstract and animated images will be intermixed to make a flow deeper.

The final output will be on DVD.