New York City’s
Queer Piers

WEB DESIGN

A digital investigation into site-specificity, artistic intervention, and queer world-building

    • Team: Solo Project

    • Type: Interactive Research Website

    • Year: 2024

    • Educational: DART 349/449

    • Timeline: Ongoing (Initial Build: 12 Weeks)

    • Format: Web-Based Narrative Intervention

    • Web Development & Coding (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

    • Concept Development + Strategy

    • Visual Tone, Typography + Iconography

    • Prototyping + Usability Testing in Figma

    • Archival + Historical Research

    • Languages & Development: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript

    • Code Environment: VSCode

    • Design Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop

    • Research Databases: Artstor, JSTOR, LGBTQIA2+ Archives + Digital Repositories

New York City’s Queer Piers is an interactive digital project that reimagines art historical and phenomenological research as a web-based narrative experience.

Based on a graduate paper originally presented at University of British Columbia’s 44th Annual Graduate Symposium, Radical (Re)worlding: Making and Breaking Worlds Through Radical Lenses, the project explores the layered histories of Manhattan’s West Side piers as spaces of queer cruising, grief, resistance, and artistic intervention.

This project began as a personal challenge: to bring my academic research to life through a digital medium. Built, written, and fully coded by me, it became both a narrative experiment and a technical learning process.

With no prior experience in web development, this website became a manifestation of my first encounters with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Its scroll-based interaction and branching pathways reflect the fragmented, fluid temporality of queer memory—inviting users to navigate artist legacies, archival fragments, and spatial histories through a nonlinear, exploratory interface.

This project reflects my continued interest in how code can serve as a narrative tool — shaping not only interaction, but the emotional and temporal experience of navigating memory, absence, presence, and collective history online.

    1. David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (Excerpts), 1986-87, super 8mm film transferred to video, black and white and colour.

      Video courtesy The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections / New York University.

    2. Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End, 1975 © The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark; and David Zwirner, New York/London/Hong Kong.

    3. Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (Collapsed Warehouse) 1975-86, Silver Gelatin Print, 8 x 6 inches. Courtesy of The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York.

    4. Andreas Sterzing, "Pier 31 & Pier 32," View from Hudson River, 1983 (link) (catalogue)

    5. Alvin Baltrop, "Friend (The Piers)," 1977, Sliver Gelatin Print, 5 x 4.25 inches.