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| mOrphosis.
New York Times Capsule |
2.1999
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| project
by mOrphosis, Santa Monica, CA, USA (collaboration) competition organized by the New York Times |
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| mOrphosis.
New York Times Capsule |
2.1999
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| project
by mOrphosis, Santa Monica, CA, USA (collaboration) competition organized by the New York Times |
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The competition brief called for the design of a New York Times Capsule to be opened in the year 3000: it would contain texts/photographs/artifacts selected by the newspaper's editors and then deposited somewhere in Manhattan, New York City, at the end of 1999. HERE'S THE STORY... 01.01.2000 - 12.20 am: White smoke from the millennium fireworks drifts over night-time Manhattan, illuminated by one hundred aircraft spot lights pointing vertically from a grid covering Central Park. A spectacular aerial photograph of the event appear on the cover of the New York Times in celebration of our new age. The next day, and forever, the grid remains... as concrete interventions, sometimes flush with the ground, sometimes under water, each encasing a removable vacuum-sealed container holding one year of the complete New York Times on microfilm, and a magnifying glass in each dated cap. In all, one hundred years of the newspaper are buried in the park, encapsulating every facet of our culture in a minefield of information. The continental shift will have slid Manhattan thirty-three feet west by the year 3000, and so the markers are placed where the park would have been in Y2K, as viewed from Y3K. The grid is recorded in diagrams on various millennium issues of Coca-Cola cans, therefore spreading the capsules' location 9.5 billion times throughout the world within one month. 01.01.2010 - 12.20 pm. The markers have taken on an unexpected significance for New York. The concrete cylinders, holding metal capsules with the respective year cast into the lid, are like monuments, or sometimes public tombstones, to the events of those years. Groups gather, often three or four different clusters surround the year stones of specific reverence to them, remembering Hendrix or Oklahoma, Star Wars, JFK or a birthday. And children play the marker game of finding these dots in the Park. The pattern almost follows the street grid, if anyone gets lost, but from the ground the grid cannot be seen, only sensed. Satellite pictures, however, pick up the colour of the caps, and so the grid emerges on maps, somehow unexpectedly, stirring the kind of excitement that surrounds deviance. 2999.12.31 - 13.12.31: We flew this morning for the millennium celebrations. Nostradamus was right... now New York is a city of hollow mountains... where only wind moves through the steel skeletons, and tumbleweed swirls along Fifth Avenue. The Statue of Liberty survives as a curious relic, in its glass box, and Central Park is ritually sprinkled and trimmed in celebration of Grass. Since global warming, only Central Park is green, an oasis for wild dogs and birdsong amidst the parched desert that stretches to Goose Bay. We've come for the opening of the capsules, newspapers suspended in time from a world we don't remember and could never imagine, where people amassed in choked cities, and where fifty-million died in a single war started by one man. A million will be here from our American villages, a populace decentralized after the New Start and coming back together again for the first time. Even more will come from other continents, following the locator maps on Coke cans which spread throughout the world... cans surviving in the garbage hills of Montana, preserved as jewellery by the fourth world, and snagged in river banks from the Ganges to the Yangtze. |
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