May 25, 2006
Urban Archives: Listening to the city
A city, or any public space, speaks in many ways.
In its architecture and design, certainly, but there are other messages, too — angry graffitti, stern warnings, war protests, confessions of love, the stoic whispers of signs fading slowly on the sides of old buildings.
Three UW graduate students — Irina Gendleman, Tom Dobrowolsky and Giorgia Aiello — feel that such images, whether text or improvised art, are like snapshots of our collective experience and history, and worthy of collection and study.
And that’s why they started the Urban Archives project, which has grown to become an ongoing digital archive, and so interested its undergraduate participants that many keep working for no credit, for the fun of continued discovery.
“This started out of an interest in studying public spaces as mediums of communication,” said Gendelman, a graduate student and teaching assistant in communication, who is herself a public art muralist. She did her master’s work at the UW on “Communication Outlaws: Graffiti Control in Public Space,” and also met Dobrowolsky there, whose interest is in ghost signs, or the outsized advertisements and messages from decades past fading on city buildings.
“So we’ve been working on this — basically, the idea is to collect and figure out what text exists in the streets and sort of classify them, as a botanist would study plants.
“When we started out, we just jumped in and started collecting everything we could, but now we’re focusing on some specific elements, like graffiti, to give us direction. But we’re not limited to that.”
Indeed not: In fact, their image collecting went so well, the students now have worked with UW Libraries to create a special digital archive of the hundreds of images they have found. It’s available for viewing at: http://content.lib.washington.edu/uaweb/index.html.
The ghost signs that make up a large part of the collection were mostly gathered by Tom Dobrowolsky, who said he first got the interest back when he took a class in historic preservation. The images, which vary greatly in condition, proudly boast of products and businesses many of which have long ago passed from life. Dobrowolsky said he was fascinated to learn that the painters who worked hard to create the building-sized images were called “wall dogs.”
At first, he said, he didn’t know what to call these images “that looked like billboards but were painted on buildings.” As he explored, Dobrowolsky said, he came to see the city differently, as a community, but in a more urban sense. “I was working with the metaphor of the city as a big library and the buildings are kind of like its books.” And as citizens read these books, the theory continued, like book readers annotating the margins they might leave comments in or on the “books” as they pass. Such annotations can be political, artistic, and many both.
But as fascinated as Gendelman, Dobrowolsky and Aiello are about the content and collection of Urban Archives material, they all are interested in it from a teaching perspective, too.
“Working with undergrads is great for us, too,” said Gendelman, adding that many students have continued working on the project for more than a single quarter. “This has been an amazing pedagogical experience — many students do more work than we assign them.”
Giorgia Aiello got the opportunity to create her own class when she was awarded a Huckabay Teaching Fellowship in 2004, so she designed a class in visual communication. Then she taught a Special Topics class in the Comparative History of Ideas program, which attracted more students, who studied the Aurora Avenue and Fremont areas of Seattle in a way that is consistent with the Urban Archives project. Enrollment has remained strong, as they mentor students through directed research credits.
At first, Aiello said, some students tend to question the seriousness or even academic legitimacy of studying buildings and graffiti. “But then they start researching and they get excited. Amazing, it’s a pattern.”
And these are not mere passing observations; the students work as research assistants in their own classes, and use ethnographic methods, photography and archival research as they gather an ever-expanding collection of images from Seattle and beyond.
The Urban Archives project started small but continues to grow. As Gendelman, Aiello and Dobrowolsky said in the mission and goals of the project, “Our mission is to grow this body of knowledge of public space through an archaeology of the city.”
The three graduate students remain enthusiastic about their project and how it can help create a greater understanding of the living history that is all around and within Seattle.
Of the project and the ghost images he studies, Dobrowolsky said, “I don’t see much difference between what somebody writes on walls as a political project and these kinds of advertisements, going all the way back to cave paintings.”
The City of Seattle, like any public space, speaks in many ways — and the UW’s Urban Archives project, it seems, is listening.
