New York

So I went to New York for spring break, and the first thing that strikes me is the process of travel or more simply movement: how fast you can move is traditionally determined by biological limitations that either enhance or decrease speed over time in a species. This ends obviously when the synthetic is brought into play, and a new hybrid of man and machine’s combined speed emerges. The fastest man on the planet can run at a speed of 23.35 mph, something that I certainly cannot do, and could theoretically at that sustained speed do 560.4 miles in a day. NASA records the highest speed achieved by an aircraft at 7459 mph, and although the jet that flew me to New York only achieved a fraction of this velocity, the comparison is equally staggering, that on a given day I am not restricted by the distances in natural human movement. Then you land in a place like few others on the planet, with a metro area just shy of 20 million, spread over 300 miles; working out to about 27575 people for m^2, and you have to ask what about the enormously complex system that supports life here is natural and what about it is synthetic, going beyond “man made” really, as that would imply some intelligent design, and though it is all done with purpose, this is not an orchestra directed by the invisible hand of god or the economy, it is system with inputs and outputs and affective relationships that spread out in any manner of directions, and to say that people created it so that they could be sustained by it is a simplification of the vast array of ways in which we sustain it and give it life all of its own… three fourths of the energy consumed by people on this planet goes forth to maintain the structure of the three fourths of things people use on this planet, an enormous sacrifice to the behemoth that is our modern technium or “city life” if you will, in this example and it would seem that the fact is apparent were it not so ubiquitous that we spend all our days in investment to an artificial system and not the traditional biological systems in which all life has developed and contended for its existence. Certainly politics and the economy, history and culture are an existence beyond these earliest biological imperatives and restraints that drive life, but none is so changing as the technological sphere than engulfs life and is life and gives life and takes life and energy and space to a place like Manhattan: The big apple, The Concrete Jungle, The City That Never Sleeps, The Capital of the World, The Empire City, The City So Nice They Named It Twice, The City, and it is not in vain that New York has afforded progress, its benefits are reaped every day by millions, and just as many may loose out in this jungle, but the rules that dictate decision making, morality, and self definition are all mirrored in the aspect that life takes on in these enourmours structured areas inhabited by men, the colonic towers gorverning in height and power, and how these giant ant hills move and change in the face of a primate with a three pound machine behind his eyes. These are some structures dedicated to power, energy and space in our world