For the last lesson we officially started another project ( time is running fast! can’t believe it is already the third one). Unlike the ones we did, Anne said she wants us to be ‘in the mist” for a while longer- purposely not telling us what is our project about. All we did was to go to our assigned neighbourhood  and collect/ research for our assigned sense. I got Chinatown and texture. Honestly I am still panicking on what am I supposed to do. And maybe because of not knowing what to do, we got lost on our way to Chinatown too. Luckily I got to go there last week and did some research on own. I paid extra attention to the surroundings and found out a lot of different textures. However to be honest a good amount of them cannot represent Chinatown as they are really common among NYC. 🙁

 

When you pay more attention, you will find a lot of different textures: rough, smooth, stained, bumpy- of course on top of them- sticky!

Can’t leave out these shoes with textures.

 

Chinatown is often crowded, without noticing, you always end up feeling other’s windbreaker when you are crossing the roads.

Since I was little I was interested in poking random buttons(a lot of them feel whimsy if you click/ push on them). This ATM still provides me what I’m looking for.

 

Even not I am not interested, souvenir shops indeed have an array of textures- from soft t-shirts to metal coated magnets.

 

Our group agreed that we will focus on the Canal Street to look for sources since Chinatown is too big and we want our information to be more concentrated and connected. Interesting enough, we went there in different times during a day (I went during day and they went during the night) and we ended up seeing different things! For example they weren’t able to find the seafood market I saw but I wasn’t able to see the night lights (welcome to chinatown sign lighted up when they got there)

Very interesting textures on the shells on the crabs, also the edges are good textures waiting for me to describe.

Also after walking for a while on Canal street, I found out everything has textures- including my backpack’s strip! This is actually unique since I don’t often hold my bag tight when I walk around in other parts of New York.( I always think Chinatown is too shady in some corners, so I want to be extra careful of my things)

 

For our lesson on Monday, Peter went through the mapping with us in a different way. He mentioned it would be a good idea to concentrate on, for example, the goods they are selling on Canal Street. Of course I will stay open on what I might do for this project but that definitely gave me some directions on how should I move on as the project progresses.