Sha and I were walking along 6th Street in San Francisco the other day,and Sha noticed one of my favorite views:Stevenson Street from 6th towards 5th, recently enhanced by the monumental bulk of Morphosis’ new-ish San Francisco Federal Building looming up behind, all Blade Runner in San Francisco-style. Google shows it OK, Microsoft’s birds-eye is nice but too far out, but I realized that I’d taken my own photos of the alley years ago, before I started Stamen and was working as an independent designer for companies like eLine.
This was probably…2000? 2001? eLine’d just moved into their new building and their site needed a new look, so I spent a day taking photographs of the space, trying to capture the stark but comfy feel of their industrial space, and the casually intense nature of the work environment. Sort of like Stamen: plants and books everywhere, quiet intensity, lots of laughter, while right outside the madness of 6th and Market raged and swung:
In any event this was back in 2000, or so and buying a building right off of 6th Street was an optimistic gesture to say the least. I’ve had an office at 16th and Mission for 9 years now, and even I definitely made sure I kept my New York face on when I walked down there for design reviews. And I’ve been watching that neighborhood closely ever since, thinking that it and the adjoining Tenderloin, where I’ve lived since 2001, were too central, too beautiful, too urban and dense and ultimately interesting to stay run-down and ignored and basically a containment zone for too much longer.
Lately there’s been alot of interesting (I would say positive) development about the neighborhood -from the new police chief’s targeted (and highly effective) drug bust, to proposals to turn a blighted stretch of Market Street into San Francisco’s version of Times Square, to Mona Caron’s lovely new building-sized mural (extra points if you can identify the lady painting), to traffic closures on Market Street making the district more accessible to bikes and pedestrians, to new galleries opening up on O’Farrell and Geary Streets. Walking around, especially at night, feels different than it did even a few months ago — it’s safer, cleaner, and there are alot more people out on the street walking and doing things, instead of yelling or fighting or dealing drugs or just generally being antisocial.
All of this is a perhaps overlong preamble to me being able to express my delight that Stamen is participating in the inaugural show for a new digital arts space in the Tenderloin: the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, or GAFFTA. We’re installing a site specific piece called Tenderloin Dynamic, which explores some familiar datasets: cabs and crimes of course, but also some new data from the Uptown Tenderloin National Register Historic District, trees, building permits, etc. The installation is about understanding the neighborhood as a varied and dynamic system with its own ebbs and flows, and we’re trying to come up with a series of views that help people understand a neighborhood that is generally represented as a monolithic, homogenous, and unpleasant spot.
Gallery shows are a departure from our usual activity — we generally tend more towards making map-generating engines than towards static representations, especially ones that get hung on gallery walls, and our only other gallery show was a dynamic system, whereas here we’re working mostly in large scale prints. But we’ve been given the whole mezzanine to work with, and what would normally be a challenge for thing-on-wall-hanging — the space has mostly half-walls that overlook the gallery proper — has turned into an interesting place to think about transparency and visibility into the neighborhood, a subject that the SFMOMA blog has contentiously addressed here and here.
I have to say that it’s an honor to be included on the same roster as Casey Reas and Camille Utterback, inventor of McArthur grant recipient, respectively — these are people you read about in textbooks on interactive media, and to be included in the same breath with them is exciting and a little humbling; I hope we can provide a worthwhile contribution to this top-notch group of digital practitioners.
In any event, the show is happening, I’m excited, you can read about it on the GAFFTA blog, and should you be anywhere near the Tenderloin on the night of Thursday, October 1 (for the fund raiser, which costs), or on Friday, October 2, please do stop by, we’d love to take you on a tour of the mezzanine!