The Concept

This is the first single continuous image of a complete city in history

Seamless City is a continuous visual image of San Francisco made up of sequential photos of a walk through the city shot from a pedestrian point of view. Each image is seamlessly visually connected to the next as the objects are in the real world.This will make an incredibly huge single image.

I think it is important and appropriate for San Francisco to be that subject because the Bay area is the birthplace and impetus for most of the technology that makes this project possible. Without computers, digital cameras, and digital printers it would basically be insane to even consider something on this scale.

San Francisco is the perfect city for this because we are physically small enough to make it feasible, while at the same time offering an incredible, uniquely varied visual landscape.

This is a huge and complicated undertaking. Most of the photos have already been shot, although I have not yet composited them.

Route

Seamless City is a continuous loop walking through San Francisco. In between I will be traveling through a cross section of the many different kinds of neighborhoods and environments of San Francisco. The route will meander to include many different areas. I mean to include a cross section from the working waterfront and industrial areas to the toniest sections of Seacliff and Pac Heights. It will really be a portrait of the real city, as a whole, not just the tourist attractions. After many years of living here and continuously exploring different neighborhoods I feel that I can present a very rich picture. At present I've plotted a route that will be about 30 miles long.

Neighborhoods that will be included are: Embarcadero / Pac Bell Park / The working waterfront / Dogpatch / The Mission / The Castro / The Sunset / Ocean Beach / Golden Gate Bridge-Fort Point / Financial District / NorthBeach / Chinatown / Bayview / Bernal Heights...etc.

Media

Seamless City is a digital project. A combination of print and electronic media. The project will be digitally printed in a signed edition. It will be printed with archival inks on archival paper and presented as a folio which will consist of between 300 -400 pages. Each recipient will also get a digital version on a set of CDs or DVDs with a guide that they can meander through on their computer.

Art History

Thanks to the following artists for being groundbreakers of both visual concepts, ideas, visual language, and artistic techniques integral to the conception and realisation of this project:

Picasso and Braque for inventing cubism and allowing multiple views in a single image, Muybridge for the invention of sequential photography, David Hockney for joiners( single images from multiple photos), Andy Warhol and the Pop artists for showing the magic possible in the mundane, and John Cage for allowing us to recognize the beauty in process that expects the unexpected.

And...

Thanks to all the crazy people in Silicon Valley for creating the tools to make Seamless City actually possible.