Subversive Tactics
The city of New York – specifically, Brooklyn; specifically, Williamsburg; specifically, the activity under and around the Marcy Av subway station – physically exhibits many of the conditions present in the digital landscape. Flows never stop, spaces are never final, and seemingly subversive spillage tactics actually act under established regulations. However, the built landscape has a long way to go. Architecture is big, slow, weighty, single-authored (so they say), and planned out. How can physical space begin to catch up to the segmented, quick, light, anonymous, spontaneous, decentralized developments present in the digital world, and subsequently interact and integrate with that world?
This research document explores the spatial logics of the undercroft of an elevated subway station in Brooklyn, at the intersection of Marcy Avenue and Broadway through the lens of the digital operations rampant in the postmodern 21st century. The research process included digitally reconstructing urban episodes found by sifting through Google Earth, analyzing territorial oddities, inspecting case studies, and proposing/imposing potential futures onto the site. The Shifting Shelves bodega materialized from the research in Subversive Tactics.
