urban posters

Urban spaces are in a continual state of flux; permanence is impossible. The inhabitants, their lives and their territorial markings are temporary. The city is being continually rewritten—like a palimpsest—layer upon layer, never quite wiping the slate clean.

What will you map?

Posters (legal or illegal) found in Auckland City.

Why will you map this?

The proposal of this mapping exercise is to examine Auckland’s streets in the ways in which people receive information whilst passing and negotiating through a space. As Denis Cosgrove mentions in his writing, “theoretically, scientific cartography should make cities highly rational, coherent spaces…yet, on the ground…cities are among the least legible places on earth…(an) apparent chaos of urban elements”.

Street art is prevalent in many places in Auckland City. These elements provide insights into the urban space and society; they can indicate the use of an area (eg: industrial or residential); the inhabitants of the area (eg: the prosperity of the area), etc…

Street art presents themselves in different forms – graffiti, murals, posters, advertisements, etc. In particular, I am interested in examining the use of posters in Auckland City. This is expected to indicate an idea of places which pedestrian and vehicular traffic passes through the most often.

Associated with street art is the element of change over time, whereby they form part of a temporary city- and street-scape. “Whether due to chemical cleansing agents deployed by local councils and property owners, or simply the effect of the wind and rain over time, at some point, it will, sooner or later, disappear.” This project will track the changes that occur to these posters/‘temporary street elements’ over a period of time.

This mapping project references Stain Allen, where he says, “traditional representations presume stable objects and fixed subjects. But the contemporary city is not reducible to an artifact” – whereby he encourages us to examine and produce new forms of notation to reflect the changes to society over time, to use notation to show “a shift from demarcated objects(s) to (an) extended field”.

How will you map this?

This mapping project will start off by recording spaces and streets where people post posters and advertisements. I plan to restrict this mapping to the Auckland CBD and its surrounding areas, and gather data from walking and driving through the streets within this area over a period of time of approximately one month. These posters are expected to change over this period, through:

- Weathering

- Physical replacement

- Physical removal

1. The first phase to the project is to map these posters into a physical format based on an existing street map of Auckland City. From previous observations, the areas in which these advertisements are most rampant tend to be in the more disused areas such as parts of main arterial roads (eg: Khyber Pass) and frequented pedestrian routes (eg: Ponsonby and K’ Road).

This mapping and data gathering will take into account of what the poster is advertising for – whether for a product or for an event. In the cases in which the promotion is for an event, the date of the event will be recorded and mapped out.

2. A secondary phase to the exercise would be to track the changes to the posters over this period of time. The survey will take into account of the type of poster:

- If the poster is for a product, when do people (or another advertiser) decide to cover/remove it?

- If the poster is for an event, does another advertiser replace/remove/cover this prior to the date of the event?

- Are these posters designed such that only a few colours are used, and font sizes are large and significant to attract attention from high-speed traffic?

The outcome of this survey and mapping project is expected to yield several different maps.

- The locations of such posters

- The concentration of the number of posters at each location, etc…

- The use of colours and font sizes

- The time at which posters are replaced/removed/covered

Objective -

Through this mapping project, I hope to achieve a result in which present the unconscious connections of Auckland’s street art (as a milieu) can be constructed, in order to present another idea also described by Cosgrove – “(to) seek to capture legibility from the contemporary city, not as a means of reworking its material spaces, but as a way of enhancing the experience of everyday urban life.”

relevant precedents

These maps give an idea of the surrounding elements found through people’s experiences of urban spaces. They can be examined through the virtual eg: the graffiti artists and rooftop analysis of Berlin using Google maps; and the real eg: New Basford project. These projects give an idea of the results that can be yielded through a person’s engagement with their surroundings, and their interpretation of the space.

New Basford, North Northingham – patterns of coverage of graffiti in the area can reveal insights into the lives of those within that particular community. For example many of the street corners, particularly those that had once housed a local shop, have much more graffiti, with examples dating back to the early 1900s, and where the sunnier sides of streets sometimes have more graffiti. The graffiti thus begins to reveal patterns of the authors’/taggers’ movement and play within the area.

Territories of authors/taggers were revealed by transposing these subjects to the map,. Often these were very local, covering just one or two streets. Sometimes, they traveled further afield. Information about the specific demographics of an area can also be revealed in such mapping, By further defining the categories by colour it is possible to get a very quick visual picture of the make up of a road in terms of whether the authors are full of hate, or love, or obsessed with sex. For example, there was also a concentration of left wing political graffiti to the south of New Basford, an area that has a mixed population, but a substantial proportion of alternative, left wing, politically active residents.

Alexanderplatz , Berlin – graffiti artists interact with the virtual world of Google to find flat rooftops, where they are interpretated as skyward scriptures for graffiti artists, as a reinterpretation of medieval maps.

Lines overhead map – mapping of objects - electric, telephone and cable wiring - overhead, where as many things go on above us as there are underneath.

derive - a selection of ironic things