Whose Streets Our Streets utilizes new technologies to access history in engaging ways. Combining LGBTQ narratives, mobile technologies, and public art, Whose Streets Our Streets is a smart phone enabled walking tour featuring sites of queer resistance in New York City. We’ve placed a QR code on physical sites throughout the New York urban landscape, inviting curious participants to learn about the streets upon which they stand. By scanning the code on a phone or tablet while walking through physical space, active users can follow the digital markers to simultaneously access photos, videos, and historic information online in real time.
Whose Streets Our Streets aims to engage the streets of history in a dialogue of now. Digitizing the sites through mobile and web technologies allows their narratives to re-emerge in contemporary conversations about queerness, public exposure and digital cultures. We are interested in telling compelling stories by using technologies that enable new avenues through which to connect and share information.
The activist chant “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” was first shouted by crowds rioting at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. In the decades that followed, the phrase has taken on new meanings as queer histories have transformed, evolved, or been all but forgotten on the busy streets of New York City. We want to honor historic moments like Stonewall by inviting users to walk these streets, learn these stories and experience history in new ways. Whose Streets Our Streets represents our effort to make visible and to remember the stories of queer resistance always present in an ever-changing urban landscape.
About the Artists:
Wesley Flash is an artist, historian, and digital media innovator. He received his MA from NYU’s Gallatin School where he was invited to present his graduate research on LGBTQ YouTube-user trends at UCLA, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan and as a TEDx talk at NYU. His creative work has been shown in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Provincetown, MA.
Anne Goodfriend is a digital artist living in Brooklyn. She spends her time creating compelling graphics and videos. Her work has been featured in projects by the arts non-profit A Blade of Grass, performance collective BabySkinGlove, singer/DJ Jessica 6, and the recently released film Delta Boys. She also participated in the artist residency program at Hearth: A Community for Contemporary Art & Sustainable Living. Anne holds a BA in Media Studies from the Eugene Lang, New School University.
For more information, contact projectwhosestreets@gmail.com
