Mapping New York City’s Collective Consciousness

Walk down any New York City street long enough and you’ll encounter vague notions about the evolving portrait of the public mind through overheard snippets of conversation and visual data points, but how to make sense of these constantly shifting associations? Multi-disciplinary designer Christian Marc Schmidt has teamed up with software developer Ivan Safrin to create Pastiche, a mind map that attempts to capture the ethos of New York City by culling keywords from across the blogosphere and matching them with the specific neighborhoods they reference. The Pastiche site explains:

New York City, in particular, has two realities: the reality of the physical environment, and the reality of the idea—of what the city and its diverse neighborhoods signify. Inseparably intertwined, these two realities constantly continue to inform each other.

Esthetically, the project references the vertical architecture of the Manhattan skyline, giving viewers a bird’s eye perspective of the collective thoughts that shape this new kind of public space – interactive despite being intangible. And in a city with eight million stories, exploring these patterns to uncover commonalities, might help us better define our place within it.

[via NBC New York]