Nate Dorr

A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit.

A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit.

Light is information, a signal more lasting than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message. Isolated in a sealed apartment, a lone observer regards an outside world outside become increasingly unreal or unreachable. Archaic illuminations, old slides and the pin-lights of the camera obscura, crawl across the walls. Connections fray. Time loses meaning. A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A rumination on optics, memory, data, and endings.

Light is information, a signal more lasting than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message. Isolated in a sealed apartment, a lone observer regards an outside world outside become increasingly unreal or unreachable. Archaic illuminations, old slides and the pin-lights of the camera obscura, crawl across the walls. Connections fray. Time loses meaning. A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A rumination on optics, memory, data, and endings.

Light is information, a signal more lasting than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message. Isolated in a sealed apartment, a lone observer regards an outside world outside become increasingly unreal or unreachable. Archaic illuminations, old slides and the pin-lights of the camera obscura, crawl across the walls. Connections fray. Time loses meaning. A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A rumination on optics, memory, data, and endings.

Despite New York’s status as a sanctuary city, ICE facilities ring and infiltrate the boroughs while its agents continue to make hundreds of arrests every month. We know this, especially when high-profile abuses are reported, but ICE presence here typically goes unseen and unremarked on. Sanctuary highlights this troubling disjunction, and the millions of people threatened by it, through a pointed act of looking at the architectural apparatuses of detention and deportation. As long as ICE persists, there is no true sanctuary.

Abandoned for forty years, the 19th-century mansions of Admiral's Row slowly recede into a wild-growing forest at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But in New York City, nothing stays hidden forever.

A vibrant industrial neighborhood thriving despite city neglect. Immigrant workers, documented and undocumented. A city plan for massive redevelopment: malls, business centers, hotels, condos. Self-serving developers. Eminent domain. A destruction. A limbo. A renewal?