Tagged with the past
Museum of the Phantom City
Posted October 1st, 2009 at 12:26 pm. There are 0 comments.
New York City of today isn’t exactly as we had imagined it. Through history there have been many possible futures that have gone unrealized. The Museum of the Phantom City presents these Architectural and Urban Design proposals as one moves through the city to the intended locations via an iPhone app that is available no in the app store. The Van Alen Institute is holding a walking tour on Sturday October 3rd, the day the full site launches.
Get the Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures iPhone app
there are 4 phone booths in NYC, this is one of them
Posted July 8th, 2009 at 11:28 pm. There are 0 comments.
West End Avenue and 101st street from Scouting New York. All four are on West End Avenue actually – at 101st, 100th, 90th and 66th.
Update: Infrastructurist points out several more in NYC, including one at 42nd and 5th as well as a lone phone booth on a Govenors Island pier.
Museum für Kommunikation
Posted December 27th, 2007 at 4:00 pm. There are 0 comments.
Last summer when in Frankfurt I visited the Museum für Kommunikation. I had written a reminder to myself very recently that I should write about my experience of visiting and was reminded again today when I read about the optical telegraph, or Semaphore, communication networks. I was familiar with semaphore, as shown in the boy scout manuals and used by lifeguards to signal to each other down the beach. I had not, until visiting the Museum für Kommunikation, known that there existed this very extensive network of towers, through out much of Europe, talking to each other in giant sign-language. At the Museum the exhibit showed examples of towers and the evolution of the tower’s signaling systems as well as the various symbol libraries, and had an interactive piece that one could use to spell out a short word using the virtual tower on a screen. In the context of the museum it fit right in, alongside an exhibit on the Thurn und Taxis mail monopoly (they have an original sealed leather mail bag that was found in a central post office after a few hundred years missing, with letters intact) and the evolution of the telephone. The entire museum is an ode to human communication, from cave paintings, to pencil and pen technology, to mail delivery systems, mechanical telephone switching, radio and television and up to and including the internet.
The amazing feeling I got here was the efforts surrounding these earlier communications. I won’t add to the continuing discourse of how communication now is easier (it is) or how we don’t appreciate this ease (we don’t) or that the magic is lost (not yet), but I will say that I do take less for granted, and can almost fantasize about the specialness of receiving a letter from a mail carrier arriving on horseback, or hearing the clicks of morse code through a wire from far away.
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