The Lives We Lost is a data art sculpture about Greenwood Cemetery Civil War veterans.
Created by Yining Shi, Upasana Jain.
The Lives We Lost is on the exhibition "This is My House of Green Grass: The Raw Retrieval of the Civil War", created by Michele Gorman and exhibited in May 2015 at Green-Wood Cemetery.
The photos above were taken by Yilei Zhang.
We got the data about 4945 veterans who served New York state during the Civil War and buried in Greenwood Cemetery. We found an interesting fact that there are more than 3000 veterans who were born out of New York State, including 35 different countries and 30 US states.There are 457 veterans who were born in Ireland, 713 veterans who were born in Germany, and 284 veterans who were from England.
We sorted all the names within different counties and US states, and we used laser cutter to make 57 birthplace tags with veterans' names on them. We put all the tag in a plastic tub with white LED strip in it. when the light emitted by LED strip meet the etched text on the tags, the texts will reflect lights. People can rotate tags to read all veterans's names and etched texts will give people a tangible feeling of all the lives we lost in the civil war.
This project shows the fact that in the New York state, immigrants, especially Irish and Germans, participated in the Civil War at a high rate. The reason behind this fact is that New Your City during the American Civil War (1861–1865) was a bustling American city that provided a major source of troops, supplies, equipment and financing for the Union Army. The port of New York, a major entry point for immigrants, served as recruiting grounds for the Army.
Here's video about the exhibition "This is My House of Green Grass: The Raw Retrieval of the Civil War", by Michele Gorman, and photos inside the video were taken by Ashley Simone.
Location: The Catacombs in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York Event: The 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War In the one hundred and fifty years since the end of the American Civil War, the data about those Civil War soldiers interred in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery have been buried with them. But in the last ten years, twice as long as the Civil War, factual and anecdotal data about these soldiers have been collected to reveal remarkable narratives that interconnect these five thousand interred veterans. When combined with the multitudinous narratives that arose from the Civil War, what new meanings and questions can be found in these data? This project uses the entire field of raw-data to explore previously unknown relationships between the interred veterans and conveys these relationships acoustically and visually. Artist, architect, and professor Michele Gorman asks these questions and responds through rule-based text extractions and spatial interventions of light within the unique site of the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs. Alex Marse and Ben Rubin explore the data acoustically, and nine New York University ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) students were asked to explore the data visually. What potential landscapes lie beneath Green-Wood, and what stories of these individuals, the Civil War and New York may be explored through these data? What are the latent human stories? This project explores possible relationships and narratives among the Civil War soldiers within the cemetery. A special thanks to Green-Wood Cemetery for the collection of the data by historian Jeff Richman and the many volunteers, led by Daniel Malia. Further, thank you to Green-Wood's Art Presson, Chelsea Dowell, and Lisa Alpert for the support of this project. Thank you to professors Jer Thorp, Mark Hanson, and Dan Lamberton. Organization, design, artistic, and film composition credit goes to Michele Gorman. https://vimeo.com/129828191 https://vimeo.com/129828190 All photography credits go to Ashley Simone. Sound credit goes to Alex Marse and Ben Rubin. Voice credits go to Seth Lamberton and Abra Gabrielle. Student work credits go to: Minju Viviana Kim and John Namu Choi https://vimeo.com/128845060 Eamon O'Connor and Sharang Biswas https://vimeo.com/128824933 Eozin Che and Zhen Liu https://vimeo.com/129039939 Upasana Jain and Yining Shi http://1023.io/dataart-greenwood/ http://www.upasanajain.com/#/civilwar/ Chang Yeon Lee https://vimeo.com/129049262
Process
At first, we sorted all the names with different birthplaces. Here's the data we got.
Then, we used Processing to experiment with the data. For each soldier, we took the his birthplace and drew one line from his birthplace to New York. The sketch is below. The code can be found here: https://github.com/yining1023/greenwood/tree/master
Besides the digital sketch, we wanted to create something that can give people tangible feelings. So we started laser cutting 57 birthplace tags with veterans' names on them. We put all the tag in a plastic tub with white LED strip in it. when the light emitted by LED strip meet the etched text on the tags, the texts will reflect lights.
