Chinatown WORK, 2006 .. ..............eric schuldenfrei & marisa
http://www.eskyiu.com/ChinatownWORK2006/index.htm

Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei are designers who focus on the
intersection of art, architecture, and global politics. In particular
their interest lies in examining the ways in which the built
environment and constructs of labor shape social relationships, network
systems, and connections between participatory design and civic
engagement. In their current work, art and technology are components
utilized to engage and inform the viewer. The work encourages
individuals to be more active in shaping the city, public space, and
the world around us.

Chinatown WORK, 2006 is an interactive public art installation for
multiple sites in Chinatown. Silhouettes of pedestrians mix the footage
of interior work spaces with time-lapse exterior street images of
unique areas that define New York’s Chinatown contemporary work
culture. The piece focuses on those industries that helped to establish
and provide immigrants’ employment in New York in the past and still
today. The interactive and responsive installation encourages community
participation in the changing landscape of Chinatown while celebrating
the people who made and still are contributing to this exceptional part
of Lower Manhattan. For the light box component of the piece, Marisa
Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei collaborated with 3-form material solutions
and October Ai to construct a sewn map of lower Manhattan and develop a
socially and environmentally conscious material for the optimum keying
of the technological needs of this project. The first site installation
is at the HSBC facade on Canal Street (58 Bowery Branch). The artists
are also planning for installations at other sites in Chinatown for the
summer of 2006.

The Public Arts installation is made possible by the generous support
of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant for Art in Public Spaces,
the September 11th Fund, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund supported by
the Department of Cultural Affairs, 3-form material solutions and Asian
American Arts Centre. The project is endorsed by the Rebuild Chinatown
Initiative (RCI), Explore Chinatown Campaign and assisted by Chinatown
Partnership LDC. First site provided by HSBC at Canal Street facade at
the 58 Bowery Branch. Opening reception generously supported by Chivas
Regal and hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

"There’s no place for factories, and there’s no place for the Chinese
immigrants to live,” said Robert Weber. “People double up in smaller
and smaller places—we had 10,000 applications for 52 subsidized housing
units on Norfolk Street’ (Washington Post, May 21, 2005)

The textile-apparel-retail chain is based on an intense mixture of high
technology, physical labor, economy, and efficiency that constantly
responds to or anticipates the demand of market dynamics. From the fall
of 2000 to the spring of 2001, a garment factory in Chinatown was
filmed for a project relating to the study of the physical nature of
the global apparel assembly industry. Two months after the tragic
events of September 11th, the factory was forced to close due to many
external pressures. A study done by the Asian American Federation of
New York in the first two weeks after September 11th noted that
three-quarters of the workforce in Chinatown, nearly 25,000 workers,
lost their jobs. In 2001, there were approximately 500 garment
factories in Chinatown, and now, according to the New York State
Department of Labor, there are only about 100 left. Not only were many
jobs lost; the sense of place and the nature of community activity were
significantly effected. As one of the employees stated, “it allowed us
a flexible schedule, to drop our kids off, come to work and be around a
community of people.” In the last quarter of 2002, more than 90% of the
surveyed restaurants, garment factories, and retail stores anticipated
an inability to recover to their pre-September 11th levels.

Five years later, Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu explored and filmed
many areas of contemporary street life including food markets, herb
stores, pharmacies, jewelry storefronts, and specialty stores, from
banking activities to construction work, in order to ask questions
about how Chinatown is doing today and where it is heading.
Concurrently, with the owners, manufacturers’, and employees’
permission (at times difficult to obtain), the artists were allowed to
film and document the interiors of garment factories, laundries, and
restaurants that are typically hidden to the public. In the public art
installation Chinatown WORK, 2006, silhouettes of pedestrians mix the
footage of interior work spaces of with time-lapse exterior street
images of unique areas that define the work culture of New York’s
contemporary Chinatown. The piece focuses on industries that have
helped to establish immigrants and provide them with employment in the
past and present, and requires public and community participation to
reveal more of the private and interior landscape of the culture of
work through their interaction.

The project utilizes real-time video processing software that allows
the computer to generate and control matted (masked) images. The
software is able to identify the motion of the passersby, create an
outline of their bodies, and replace their bodies with the time-lapse
footage. For the light box component of the piece, Marisa Yiu and Eric
Schuldenfrei collaborated with 3-form material solutions and October Ai
to construct a sewn map of lower Manhattan depicting the area of
Chinatown, while marking places relevant to their research onto bolts
of Linea Vert fabric. The fabric was then laid into 3-form material
solution’s eco-resin, a specially formulated translucent polyester
resin that is environmentally friendly and engineered to incorporate
40% recycled material. The first installation site is at the HSBC
facade on Canal Street (58 Bowery Branch). The artists are also
planning for other sites in Chinatown for the summer and fall of 2006
to engage different areas, invigorate other public spaces, and
ultimately celebrate the people that make Chinatown work.

CONTACT: info@eskyiu.com

BIOGRAPHIES

Eric Schuldenfrei
Teaching Appointments: Princeton University: School of Architecture and
Columbia University: Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and
Preservation. Eric Schuldenfrei is the Principal of his own practice:
Eric Schuldenfrei Animation: Art + Architecture. He is a designer and
artist who focuses on the evolving relationship between animation,
architecture, and art. Recent projects include an art installation for
Agnes Gund, President Emerita of MoMA, in collaboration with architect
Markus Dochantschi; time-lapse animations for all eight finalists of
the World Trade Center Memorial Competition for the LMDC; and a short
film created with Christian Bruun for "Non standard Architectures"
featuring the architecture of Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald,
exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Past work includes
"Alladeen", a cross media collaboration with Moti Roti and The Builders
Association, currently on tour worldwide; and an animation for "the
City without a Ghetto," in conjunction with Marisa Yiu and The Center
for Urban Pedagogy. Further projects include computer animations for
Diller + Scofidio and The Builders Association's multi-media theater
work "Jet Lag"; and an animation and video installation "The Measure of
All Things," a collaboration with artist Haluk Akakce which was
exhibited at Casino Luxembourg, P.S.1, NY; Kunst Werke, Berlin; The
Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; and the Centre d' art Contemporain,
Geneva. Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu were finalists for the Athens
2004 Olympics installation for the ‘look of the city’ project and have
collaborated on other projects such as ‘By-Product’ and ‘Blue-prints
for Art in General’. In addition to Princeton University and Columbia
University, he has taught in the Graduate School of Fine Arts,
Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania;
the Integrated Design Curriculum and the Department of Architecture at
Parsons School of Design. He holds a Bachelors of Architecture from
Cornell University and a Masters of Philosophy from Cambridge
University, U.K.

Marisa Yiu
Marisa Yiu has an interdisciplinary design collaborative called Mksyiu
Studio. She is currently invited as the 2005-6 design panelist for the
Chinatown Design Lab, organized by the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative
(RCI) and AAFE, a non-profit organization that is a nationally
recognized affordable housing and social provider. Her recent
independent projects include ‘No Sweat’, an installation shown at the
exhibition honoring the 30th anniversary of Asian Americans For
Equality (AAFE), and ‘Brandspider’ for the Whitney Museum’s ISP
exhibition entitled EMPIRE/STATE: Engaging Globalization. Marisa Yiu’s
collaborations with Eric Schuldenfrei include ‘Re_lapse: the atlantic
terminal time line’ with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, shown at the
Storefront for Art and Architecture and recently at the Rotunda
Gallery, Brooklyn. Yiu and Schuldenfrei have previously collaborated on
‘By-Product’ and ‘Optical Field’ a proposal for the Arts event
installation for the Athens Olympics 2004. Yiu has taught a seminar
entitled ‘Public Construction’ with Netherlands-based UNstudio
architects, Ben Van berkel and Caroline Bos; a course at the Integrated
Design Curriculum of the Parsons School of Design; and recently ‘City
of Neighborhoods’ workshops on Chinatown at the Cooper Hewitt Design
Musuem that examined design and civic engagement. Yiu previously worked
as the Designer for the International Commerce Center (Kowloon Tower
project) in Hong Kong, the Guangzhou TV Tower and Master Plan and the
Shanghai World Financial Center at KPF Architects (2001-2005). She also
worked on the team that received the 2000 “Record Awards,” of the
Architectural Record for the Open Loft Project, design team of
Marble.Fairbanks Architecture. She received the Suzanne Kolarik
Underwood Prize (the highest honor) at the Graduate School of
Architecture, Princeton University for her design and research thesis
project entitled ‘Behind the Label: the global assembly’ and she was a
nominated candidate for the Rolex Arts Initiative award in 2002. She
holds a B.A. from Columbia University and a Masters of Architecture
from the Graduate School of Architecture, Princeton University.