­­­urban posters 1:200

An ‘authentic’ sense of place is discovered through a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex identity of place – going beyond the ephemerality of the constantly changing modern world.

This mapping project mapped the changes - over 20 days - in the urban posters of four different areas:

1 Khyber Pass, New Market
2 Upper Symonds Street, Grafton
3 Symonds Street (bus stops), Auckland City
4 Anzac Ave – Beach Rd, Auckland City

These areas are not specified on the diagrammatic images, rather, people are encouraged to discover each diagram’s site through their own perception of them in terms of scale, sizes, proportions and changes to the posters over time.

Notable in these four diagrams are posters that got damaged when people destroy them, or when they are removed to accommodate for the next batch of posters being pasted on. These are represented by grey outlines.

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.”

When these posters are categorised in colours, what emerges is a pattern of genres (new albums, events, movies, concerts, etc.). Examining these patterns penetrates the outwards commercialised sense of the mass culture of posters, and instead enables the audience to view the locations as a series of categories of signage for an intended market audience, such that one can perhaps begin to read the sites in a less cluttered/homogenous nature.

The posters were categorised and identified in a complimentary booklet to record the posters (of the four sites) of Auckland City over the period of 09.09.09 – 28.09.09.