Urban Attractors and Private Distractors

March 2007

Supported by Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts

Urban Attractors and Private Distractors is a vlog (Video Blog) project about privacy in public space in Eastern culture. It compares the results of Dérives in Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) and New York City.

The collective will address questions such as: How is a city constructed in a culture where the inhabitants have little experience of a private physical space? Do they adapt more readily to cyberspace which is both private / public simultaneously? How do Westerners reclaim their ‘public space’? Organized Dérives in both cities will commence at the most public of spaces—the town square.

Participants will submit videos as urban indicators of private and / or public to the vlog until the workshop meetings in June. Eng, the project director, will continue vlogging until the commencement of the physical installation in Fall 2007.

By Angie Eng, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Student interns in New York and Ho Chi Minh City.


Browse the archive.


by Eng, Streitmatter-Tran, et al