City Signals / Ongoing, Anna Serio

Medium: Digital

City Signals / Ongoing is a personal map of my first months in New York City. It is built from small moments that have shaped how I see the city. Instead of mapping streets or landmarks, the work maps what happens within them. Each moment becomes a signal through which I locate myself in the city.

I think of mapping space as a kind of emotional sonar: a way of locating myself through moments, people, and places. As these signals accumulate, the map shifts, and so does my perception of the city.

This work grew out of my Human-Centered Design studies at Pratt, where I developed City Signals, exploring how people navigate the city through local information and personal experience. When I asked what people liked most about New York, I kept hearing the same answer: the people. This work takes that idea in a more personal and analog direction, turning the map into a record of lived experience.

The map is intentionally imprecise. Distances, locations, and relationships between places are distorted by my own perception. Its inaccuracies are part of the work: it reflects not the city as it is, but the city as I experience it.

In relation to Abundance: Gathering, Giving, and Sharing, the work considers abundance as a layering of moments. Different people, places, encounters, and shared moments occupy the same city, creating a personal and ever-changing map. A stratified record of where I have been, who I have shared it with, and what has happened there.