For the first time in 53 years, New York Knicks fans will be celebrating the team’s NBA championship win, and this time, they're getting a parade through lower Manhattan. Many New Yorkers will be showing up to party in person on Thursday morning, but not everyone will be able to make it to the event. For those who are celebrating from afar (or begrudgingly stuck at the office while the procession takes place), artist Morry Kolman has an option for you: watching via several traffic cameras along the parade route and surrounding City Hall, where the parade will end.
Kolman is livestreaming the camera feeds as part of his project, GardenCam, which has been streaming and archiving traffic camera footage of street revelers throughout the Knicks’ historic finals run against the San Antonio Spurs.
A native New Yorker, Kolman and his friends have suffered through many seasons of tragedy and loss. After an ecstatic game 2 win, Kolman felt like he wanted to do something to capture the “bigger energy rippling through the city,” he tells WIRED. After polling friends for ideas, a “handsome lawyer friend” suggested that he start pulling traffic camera footage from around Madison Square Garden, where fans had been gathering to watch the game.
Kolman, who describes his artistic practice as “high-effort shitposting,” says he was interested in how many people were posting videos of themselves and others watching the games outside of MSG, and wanted to give fans another angle to capture the experience from.
His initial game 3 coverage took a darker turn than he expected. Not only did the Knicks face a devastating loss, but President Donald Trump’s attendance meant that the traffic cameras suddenly became a way to witness the increased surveillance around the Garden.
“Instead of showing off all the celebrations happening around MSG, it was actually a way to watch the live imposition of a perimeter and police state around midtown,” says Kolman.
GardenCam is a successor of Kolman’s 2024 art piece, Traffic Cam Photobooth, which tapped into NYC’s vast surveillance network of traffic cameras to let people take selfies. The piece garnered a cease-and-desist letter from the New York City Department of Transportation. At the time, the NYC DOT argued that the project “encourages and promotes the unauthorized use of New York City (NYC) traffic cameras” and that people taking photos of themselves in the middle of the road was “inherently unsafe.”
Kolman was directed to “remove and disable all portions” of the Photobooth website that related to NYC traffic cameras, and remove all URLs to city-owned webpages, including any links captioned “camera map.” In response, he took a photo of the letter with a traffic camera and later exhibited the project at Art Basel in Miami.
A NYC DOT spokesperson tells WIRED in an email that the agency “has no objection to the GardenCam project” but did not elaborate further. Several streets and subway stations will be closed for the parade, and bikes and scooters will be prohibited, perhaps mitigating concerns about pedestrian safety.
Kolman says of the agency’s stance, “I think they've learned to let me have my fun, and I think that's a good decision.”
Source: Wired
