projects / image processing
Vertical Neighborhoods
A neighborhood is a pile of everything its culture produces: shop signs, chain stores, card stickers on restaurant doors, music shops, satellite dishes, facades from different centuries. Like the Tower of Babel, this project stacks all of it vertically into one tower per neighborhood, a loose pile that only recalls the landmark standing over it: the Galata Tower for Karaköy, the TV Tower for Berlin.
Every block is cut from my own photographs of that neighborhood and stays a separate piece. The towers lean in the wind, rattle when you scroll and can be pushed by dragging. They sway, but they do not fall.
KaraköyIstanbul
157 blocks · 81 photos · 2019–2026A loose pile that recalls the Galata Tower. Hardware dealers of Perşembe Pazarı at the base, the banks street, Kemeraltı, Kemankeş and Tophane in the body, a lopsided ring of red two-tone prints and a narrowing top in photocopy. A photograph of the real tower sits on the tip, a cruise ship underneath.
Open the map →BerlinGermany
83 blocks · 16 photos · 2019A loose pile that recalls the Fernsehturm, from a February 2019 trip. Kreuzberg as the pavilion with the Berliner Dom and the Volksbühne on its shoulders, Friedrichshain and Mitte in the shaft, City West and Südstern in a bulge near the top. The antenna alternates red two-tone and photocopy prints; the Südstern church spire is its tip.
Open the map →Method
Sources
Photos of each neighborhood from my archive, found by location and date. Frames dominated by people are left out, and people are masked out of the rest.
Cutting
Each photo is split into candidate blocks. Text and object detection decide the frame: a shop sign is either kept whole or not used, and objects stay recognisable.
Stacking
The outline of each neighborhood's landmark is only a loose guide. Blocks are piled from the bottom up, each sinking into the lowest gap; widths wander, blocks tilt and stick out past the edges, and nothing is cut to shape. Prints vary between natural colour, photocopy and red two-tone. Nothing is drawn.
Repetition
Chain stores, card stickers and vending machines repeat in the tower the way they repeat in the city. Other blocks are not allowed to repeat.
Map
Each tower is tiled into a zoomable map. Clicking a block opens the photo it was cut from.