Manhattan Shadow Project, a workshop of the School of Missing Studies was held at Van Alen Institute in New York City from May 10-14, 2004, to investigate the shadow in the metropolis, as it takes on an array of physical, digital and metaphorical appearances and meanings. A presentation was held on Thursday May 13, 2004, at 6.30 pm.

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The participants in the Manhattan Shadow Project gathered to discussed with invited architects, artists, and writers from New York and Belgrade and make a database of occurrences of Manhattan shadows—physical, metaphorical, and digital. Below is a brief summary of the discussions.

New York has been shaped by its shadow. The zoning laws of the 1930s rendered in chalk by Hugh Ferris, widely known as the “master of darkness,” are the force that makes us see the metropolis as it is now. The shadow was the last systematic redefinition of Manhattan, the future looked like a dark metropolis lit primarily from many interiors by holes punched into the mountains of tall building blocks. Did it succeed specifically because it defined itself as the negative of the form? The principle has since then left defining traces in the metropolis, from canyon-like streets, sheer walls of office buildings, air rights, and sidewalk setbacks, all as a result of the relations between the shadow and the law.

And today, if Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, entitled the Second Bilbao, a “shadow” of Bilbao but four times bigger, ever got built in downtown Manhattan, what could be made out of its shadow?

Sina Najafi and Cabinet Magazine had the idea to make an architectural competition for the shadow: bigger buildings have bigger shadows, a generous monstrosity of a kind, we would say. A ”Guggenheimlich Maneuvre” for the good of the public? As the epiphenomenona of the shadow, the buildings for the public could trail new possibilities. What is interesting, we think, about the fantasy to build cities as the epiphenomena of the shadow is that the shadow is already there first, it is a reality. Hugh Ferris knew that. This makes a crazy idea now just a standard desire. Even though the architectural competition did not happen, ideas flew in like what if we make a second sun to follow the first sun and systematically annul shadows, we would arrive probably where Olafur Eliasson thought when TATE London installed his artificial sun in the Turbine Hall. Erasing traces or just shadowing each other?

The presence of the shadow provides evidence but stands in for absent form, often too loaded to be taken lightly, and shifts our attention to shape. Artist Nebojsa Seric–Shoba noted that the shadow is an equalizer; everyone in the shadow is in the same situation.

The new art trend in avoiding surveillance in the city marks the existence of just one of the digital shadows in the growing array of electronic trails. Katie Salen discussed artwork that, after decades of obsession with the fetish of surveillance, steps out of that digital shadow. Interacting with data, which can also be sonic, is a norm of urban presence. This is the opposite of making hidden structures visible, like Vadim Fishkin’s Sun_Stop to keep the sun visible. Instead of making the invisible visible, the idea is to make what is visible, visible always. Back in the digital shadow, Salen observes that when we create or interact with data, this data sets us on a journey leaving our trail, which does not have to be proximal. It can have a life of its own.

And when Dan Sherer points out that the major anxiety of public life today is the aporia of the sole corpus, which is today the corporation, this excavates the fear that we do not need the body of the king, we do not need the sun, but we can’t survive without the corporation. The anamorphosis that Sherer points to in the 16^th-century painting Holbein’s The Ambassadors, is simultaneously against form and also allegory, a return to form. The absence of vanishing point temporalizes the vanishing; because you must move, the painting creates multiple vanishing points and interpretations. Uncertainty about interpretations can be a sign of dignity not to interpret; remove yourself, and here we would say towards the shadow. How many more interpretations can a sign hold? How much more complex it becomes if Holbein’s distorted skull is a reference, a distorted corpus, a shadow of life.

Anamporphosis sets up the elliptical order of presenting as central that which is not to be seen. We experience a looming analogy downtown. The empty Deutsche Bank, a massive building just next to the World Trade Center void, draped in black on three sides. Random windows facing away from the void are lit sporadically to make it appear that the building is used. The corporate building is actually pronounced dead.

And if you are a short-term visitor, how can you uncover the size of Manhattan in just a few strokes? How can you be sure that you are not given something to which everybody else is being curtailed? Four participants who were in New York for the first time plus two natives were tasked to cross Manhattan diagonally, as opposed to following Avenues and Streets, so six ‘strokes’ together cover the island as a network. Each participant then recorded different occurrences of the shadow and plugged them into a growing database.

The subject of trash, as a shadow of usage, was a trail starting at Roosevelt Island, a special place that does not have trash cans or any visible leftovers of the city’s embarrassments--all of this is vacuumed away through a pipe under the East River to Queens. The route continued via Columbia University and ended by the George Washington Bridge at the sewage treatment facility, its top landscaped as a park. Another trail connects metropolitan hubs Grand Central, Penn Station and central post office ending with a few remaining housing projects in Chelsea. Observing density of people and infrastructure, can you ever step again into the shadow of the commuting trail that you left the day before? The next path ending at the piers in Chelsea where shadows are smooth from fresh landscaping for the upper-middle class, started at Wall Street where shadows are sharpest. The gradation between social strata and activity is signaled by the degree of diffused shadow. Tracing Battery Park City in the West to the Brooklyn Bridge in the East in search of shadows produced by sparks and artificial lighting. A section through the island reveals the loss of depth and shadowless realms of interior far below the horizon. The transversal from Hells Kitchen on the West via the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Metropolitan Museum, Guggenheim and finally across Spanish Harlem looked at the gaps between buildings, the sort of common property that could be filled by cultural artifacts now inside darkened museum buildings. The track that closes the diagonal network starts with the UN building, itself a voluntary shadow of architectural authorship as well as geo-politics, crosses the previous trail at the well-authored Guggenheim, and ends in the Upper West Side. This was a source for collecting distortions of metropolitan reflections in mundane objects, as mundane is the shadow of special.  

Contributing to the shadow database are: Andreja Miric, Jelena Mitrovic, Dejan Mrdja, E Thad Pawlowski, Dubravka Sekulic, and Sofia Zuberbuhler.