All aboard the Staten Island ferry

The Staten Island Ferry is that strangest of things – an extremely functional public transport service route that also doubles as one of New York’s most popular tourist attractions as it’s free and it takes you past the Statue of Liberty.

So the makeup of ferry travellers varies in percentage of tourists to locals depending on the time of day you take it – here it is docking into Staten Island at the end of its brief 20-minute trip.

City version:

Graeme Rose reimagined this New York sound, and took his inspiration from Blade Runner:

“For this Cities and Memory project I realised that the deadline was, more or less, when the events in the 1982 film Blade Runner take place.

“This got me considering what the Staten Island ferry would be like in this alternative November 2019. Maybe it would be a space port as well as a normal ferry crossing?

“I sliced up the file into the announcements ( for glitching and distorting) and slams from it as heartbeating-ish engine throbs, with the sounds of the water as background hum/hiss. And went for an ambient-ish set of music chords which ebb and flow, and surround, like waves over the ferry noises to surround them all.

“So do Electric Ferries dream of Staten Island?”

Memory version: