The City’s Secret Ink

A short article up at The New Yorker follows the adventures of so-called “ink enthusiasts” as they seek new sources of pigment in New York City.

[Image: Via Flickr].

The author, Amy Goldwasser, tags along as the group wanders on “a five-hour foraging trip that would take them up to Hudson Heights, to collect foliage and trash, which they would cook, to make ink.”

By the time the foragers left Central Park, the pockets of [tour leader] Logan’s jacket were already bleeding pink. After finishing uptown, a few hours later, they went to [a participant’s] apartment, to make ink. One batch was pure pokeberry juice (vivid magenta). Another included five varieties of acorn boiled with rust from various sources—nuts and bolts, wire, brackets—and a drop of gum arabic. It came out a complicated silver-gray. Logan spread a range of ink pots on [the participant’s] kitchen table. He dipped the bottom of a glass jar into the rust-and-acorn ink and pressed it onto a piece of paper, making a silvery circle. “Look at our day,” he said. “Now, that, to me, is the blood of New York.”

The city’s capacity to leave marks—to stain, print, and tattoo the things and people that pass through it—can be found in the most mundane items, secret ink hidden inside “acorns, wild grapevines, beer caps, feathers, subway soot.”

Read more at The New Yorker.

(Vaguely related: Dumpster Honey).

Second Central

I’ve been delinquent in mentioning an open landscape design competition, with a deadline in October, seeking designs for “a new, 21st century Central Park.” Sponsored by the journal LA+, the competition brief “asks you to redesign New York’s Central Park, which has been fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists.”

The journal suggests bearing these four main points in mind, if you proceed:

1) If in parks, no matter how faux or superficial, we manifest a collective aesthetic expression of our relationship with the “natural” world, then what, on the occasion of nature’s disappearance, is the aesthetic of that relationship today? 2) What is the role of a large urban park today? 3) How might issues of aesthetics on the one hand and performance on the other coalesce into what [Central Park’s original designer Frederick Law Olmsted] described as “a single work of art”? 4) Given the extraordinary history of the Central Park site, the competition asks how the new interprets the old, and how together, the new and the old anticipate the future.

Basically, it’s an opportunity to propose an entirely new kind of urban park, in the heart of New York City, for an explicitly interdisciplinary group (I should mention that I am also on the competition jury).

Perhaps it’s a chance to rethink the Park as an act of social justice and equitable access to urban wilderness; perhaps it’s a chance to explore the financial implications of large-scale landscape reserves put aside in the very center of the metropolis; perhaps it’s a chance to explore biotechnology, synthetic life, and the topographic implications of the Anthropocene.

There is much more information on the competition website, including how to submit. You have until October 10th, 2018.