If I was asked that question before Wednesday night, my answer would have been, Nope. Where is that? What is that? Should I know about that?
FreshKills was originally a marshy swamp in Staten Island and then became the largest landfill in the world. It’s no longer a landfill but going under restoration to become a park.
The same way that I didn’t know anything about FreshKills there are many other people around NYC that doesn’t know what’s going on, especially those that live in Staten Island. So, the challenge for the night was to come up with a way that would communicate to the Staten Island community what was going on, what would happen, and what they currently had access to. I was in the studio, 2 or more, which means we had to come up with collaborative ideas on how to spread the message about Fresh Kills.
All three of the subgroups that fell under the 2 or more studio, had the theme of “Old School With A Twist”. Urban guerrilla gardening…live feed digitized billboards…and live feed viewfinders.
My group decided on the idea of sight-seeing and using view-finder/ binoculars. These binoculars would be linked to cameras placed in various locations of the park, and that would allow you to get a live feed of what was happening in the park, seeing construction, checking on the goats, getting an overall sense of what is happening to the land, as well as getting information updates about the park and possibly a history of the area. The binoculars would be placed in locations that the community has easy access to like the mall, bus stops, the subway, along the perimeter of the park, as well as in areas nearby Staten Island like Bay Ridge and New Jersey.
Now this doesn’t seem like it would be a collaborative activity, but we looked at collaboration as another way into community and having the idea or knowledge that other people are doing the same thing at the same time. What that means is, the binoculars will have a map of where all the binoculars are in Staten Island and will show when people are using it, so you could “see” that there are others looking into the park as well. The map will also have a direction guide on how you can get to the open parts of the park from your current location, which is necessary as well as helpful because there is only one entrance right now.
What I really love about these binoculars are that they’re iconic, in the sense that everyone knows their purpose and function from grandma and grandpa to a 5 year old. It can also draw in every type of person because it’s so knowable and it’ll have that element of mystery with what people will get to see.