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Paggank Daywaygun (2017) is a multi-user interactive digital, kinetic, geo-locative performance media project that uses algorithmic functions calculated in a custom GPS Tracking Phone App that directs participants around Governors Island and back through Manhattan in order to repopulate NYC with nut trees and island soil.

The soil that makes up more than half of Governors Island originated from the 1912 NYC subway system excavation. In Paggank Daywaygun (aka. “Nut Island” + “drum sounds”) participant movements around NYC are physically mapped to a user responsive nut shooting machine in the Harvestworks buildling.

The nut shooter propels walnuts toward a target or “drum,” signifying the gradual historic disappearance of nut trees on Governors island, and the reason which the Lenape natives initially named the island “Paggank.”

Each gallery visitor is assigned a specific Manhattan subway line and asked to take a seed pod with subway soil on a hangar. The participant will log into the pod-tracker app and head towards the subway line where they will hang the seed-pod on one of the hand-rails in hopes that someone will take and plant them.

READ BELOW FOR A DEEPER ANALYSIS OF THE PROJECT:

Paggank Daywaygun (2017): Indigenous Memory, Urban Ecology, and the Politics of Movement

Max Kazemzadeh and Reza Safavi’s Paggank Daywaygun (2017), also known as PagDay’17, can be understood as an interdisciplinary artwork that connects interactive media, kinetic sculpture, locative technology, ecological restoration, and the contested histories of urban space. By directing participants through New York City using a custom GPS-tracking application, connecting their movements to a nut-shooting machine at Harvestworks, and inviting them to distribute seed pods containing soil associated with the city’s subway system, the project transforms navigation into an act of ecological participation and historical remembrance.

The work operates across several interconnected environments: Governors Island, the Manhattan subway network, the streets through which participants travel, the gallery where their movements activate a mechanical apparatus, and the potential future locations where the distributed seeds might take root. These environments are not merely backdrops. They form a network of physical, historical, and technological relationships through which the artwork unfolds.

At its conceptual center is a striking proposition: the movement of people through a city can become a means of recovering ecological relationships that urban development has displaced or obscured.

The project does not simply represent the history of Governors Island or illustrate the disappearance of its nut trees. It creates a participatory system through which that history can be encountered, circulated, and potentially acted upon. GPS coordinates become inputs to an artistic process; a mechanical device translates movement into physical action; subway infrastructure becomes a distribution network for seeds; and participants become temporary agents in an ecological intervention whose ultimate results remain uncertain.

The artwork therefore asks how technology might be used not only to navigate existing urban systems but also to reveal their hidden histories, challenge their assumptions, and create opportunities for alternative futures.

1. Governors Island as a geological and historical palimpsest

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One of the project’s most compelling conceptual starting points is the history of Governors Island’s soil. According to the project description, more than half of the island’s soil originated from excavation associated with the construction of New York City’s subway system in 1912.

This detail complicates the seemingly straightforward distinction between an island’s natural environment and the infrastructure of the surrounding metropolis. The ground beneath the island is, in significant part, a material record of urban development. Soil excavated to construct the transportation network was relocated and became part of the island’s physical landscape.

The city and the island are therefore materially connected in ways that ordinary maps may not reveal. What appears to be an island landscape contains the displaced geological material of a subterranean urban infrastructure.

This relationship invites a reading of the island as a palimpsest: a place where successive histories remain embedded in the same physical environment. The construction of transportation infrastructure did not simply alter the city above ground. Its excavation generated material that contributed to the formation of another landscape.

The project’s movement of seed pods containing subway soil extends this material relationship into a new direction. Rather than treating soil as an inert substance, the work presents it as a carrier of history, displacement, and potential ecological renewal.

This approach resonates with environmental art practices that regard materials as active participants in historical and ecological processes. Soil is not merely a medium for planting. It records geological transformations, human intervention, transportation infrastructure, and the movement of matter between places.

The project thus makes urban infrastructure perceptible through its material consequences. A subway line is ordinarily understood as a route for moving passengers, but here its history is also present in the soil that helped constitute Governors Island.

The work suggests that cities are not only networks of streets, buildings, and transportation systems. They are also accumulations of displaced materials and forgotten relationships.

2. Paggank: Indigenous place-naming and ecological memory

The project’s title introduces another historical dimension. The description associates Paggank (“Nut Island”} with the Lenape name for Governors Island and connects the name to the island’s historical abundance of nut trees.

This relationship is central to the work’s conceptual structure. The project does not approach the island solely as a contemporary recreational landscape or a site shaped by modern infrastructure. It invokes an earlier ecological and cultural history in which the island’s identity was associated with its plant life.

Place-names can preserve relationships between communities and their environments. A name that refers to a particular ecological feature records more than a geographical designation: it may also indicate what was distinctive, useful, or meaningful about a place.

In this context, the disappearance of nut trees becomes more than a change in vegetation. It represents the erosion of an ecological relationship through which the island was understood and named.

The work’s attempt to repopulate New York with nut trees can therefore be interpreted as an effort to reconnect a contemporary urban environment with an ecological history that is no longer readily visible.

There is, however, an important distinction between ecological restoration and the recovery of Indigenous cultural knowledge. Planting trees associated with an Indigenous place-name does not, by itself, restore the cultural relationships, sovereignty, or historical presence of the Lenape people. The artwork’s significance is strongest when its ecological gesture is understood as an invitation to recognize those histories, rather than as a claim that an artistic intervention can resolve their historical erasure.

The title also brings together the project’s two principal sensory and material elements: nuts and drumming. The association between the island’s former nut trees and the target or drum struck by the machine creates a symbolic relationship between ecological loss and sound.

The drum can be understood as a form of material commemoration. Each impact gives physical expression to a history that might otherwise remain abstract. At the same time, the nut-shooting mechanism makes the project’s historical reference playful, kinetic, and potentially disruptive.

This combination of Indigenous place-memory, ecological change, and mechanical action establishes a productive tension. The work uses contemporary technology to draw attention to histories that predate the technological systems through which the contemporary city is organized.

3. Locative media: turning navigation into a form of historical inquiry

The custom GPS-tracking application transforms the participants’ movements through New York City into an integral component of the artwork. Rather than presenting a fixed map of the city’s history, Paggank Daywaygun asks participants to move through urban space according to algorithmically generated directions.

This makes the project an example of locative media: artistic practice in which geographic position, movement, and location-based information contribute to the experience of the work.

Yet the project’s use of GPS is conceptually significant for reasons beyond navigation. GPS ordinarily helps people orient themselves within an existing geographical framework. It answers questions such as where someone is, how to reach a destination, and which route to follow. In this installation, those capabilities are redirected toward an ecological and historical purpose.

The city becomes a field of possible actions. Movement through it is no longer exclusively a matter of getting from one location to another; it becomes a means of participating in the circulation of seeds, soil, and historical memory.

This shift raises a fundamental question about technological mediation: Can the systems that organize our movement through contemporary urban environments also help us perceive and transform the histories embedded in those environments?

The GPS application provides one answer by connecting otherwise separate locations and activities. Governors Island, Manhattan’s subway lines, the participants’ journeys, and the kinetic sculpture at Harvestworks become components of a shared process.

A participant’s movement through the city is registered by a computational system and translated into a response from a physical machine. The urban journey is thus connected to an event occurring elsewhere.

This creates an unusual relationship between physical presence and remote action. Participants may be walking through Manhattan while their movements influence a mechanical apparatus inside a gallery. The work links the experience of being in one place with consequences occurring in another.

The result is a distributed artwork whose boundaries exceed the gallery. Its operative space consists not only of the room containing the machine but also of the subway network, the streets, the island, the mobile application, and the paths traveled by participants.

The artwork’s geographical reach becomes part of its conceptual meaning. New York is no longer simply the location in which the installation takes place; the city itself becomes an active component of the installation.

4. The nut-shooting machine: translating movement into kinetic sculpture

At Harvestworks, participant movements are mapped onto a responsive nut-shooting machine that propels walnuts toward a target or drum, the reappropriated lid of a metal trash can.

This mechanism establishes a material translation between two different kinds of action. On one side is the participant’s movement through urban space, registered as geographical information. On the other is the physical trajectory of a walnut propelled toward a target.

Between them lies an algorithmic system that converts one form of activity into another.

The machine therefore operates as more than a kinetic sculpture. It functions as a physical interpreter of remote movement, giving material expression to data that might otherwise remain invisible on a screen.

The transformation is conceptually important because it makes digital information consequential in the physical world. GPS coordinates become inputs to a system that produces sound, motion, and impact. The participant’s geographical journey acquires a mechanical counterpart, allowing an action performed elsewhere to be experienced through the machine’s response.

The target or drum further complicates this translation. Its sound can evoke the loss of the island’s nut trees, while the walnuts themselves recall the ecological material that the project seeks to reintroduce into the urban landscape.

The machine thus combines several functions:

• It translates movement into a physical event.
• It transforms computational data into sound and kinetic action.
• It connects contemporary technological infrastructure with ecological history.
• It gives the participant’s geographically dispersed activity a shared point of sensory reference.

There is an inherent ambiguity in the mechanism. A walnut is simultaneously a potential seed, a physical object, and a projectile. The machine can be read as an instrument of play, a device for producing sound, or a symbolic enactment of ecological disappearance.

This ambiguity is productive. Rather than presenting ecological restoration as an uncomplicated or purely sentimental activity, the work stages a relationship between destruction and regeneration, disappearance and return, mechanical force and organic life.

The nut is both the thing being propelled and the material reminder of the trees that the project seeks to recover.

The machine’s operation consequently creates a symbolic circuit: an ecological absence is invoked through the movement of the very object associated with that absence.

5. The subway as an infrastructure for ecological redistribution

Perhaps the project’s most compelling intervention is its use of the Manhattan subway system as a potential network for distributing seeds.

Each gallery visitor is assigned a subway line and given a seed pod containing soil on a hanger. Through the tracking application, the participant is directed toward that line, where they are asked to hang the pod on a handrail in the hope that another person will take it and plant it.

This gesture transforms public transportation infrastructure into a possible mechanism for ecological redistribution.

The subway ordinarily facilitates the movement of people through the city. Its routes, stations, and handrails are designed to support circulation, accessibility, and the repetitive rhythms of urban life. In Paggank Daywaygun, these familiar structures acquire a second purpose: they become potential points in a network through which seeds may travel.

The project does not replace the subway’s existing function. Instead, it temporarily reimagines the infrastructure as a carrier of biological possibility.

The hanger is particularly significant. It is a mundane object associated with storage and suspension, but within the artwork it becomes a mobile vessel for soil and seeds. By attaching the pod to an everyday urban fixture, the participant inserts an ecological proposition into an environment not ordinarily associated with planting.

The seed pod becomes a small intervention in the habitual choreography of the city.

A commuter may encounter it without having any prior knowledge of the artwork. That person might take it, ignore it, question its purpose, or eventually plant it. Each response opens a different possible trajectory for the work.

This introduces a form of participation that extends beyond the original audience. The artwork’s potential recipients include people who have not entered the gallery, downloaded the application, or knowingly agreed to participate in an artistic project.

The subway therefore functions as a space of encounter between intentional artistic action and unpredictable public behavior.

This is also a form of distributed authorship. The original artists establish the framework, participants transport the seed pods, and unknown members of the public may determine what happens next. The work’s eventual outcome is not entirely under the control of any one person.

Its ecological ambition depends on a chain of actions that may or may not be completed.

6. Seeds, uncertainty, and the temporality of ecological art

Seeds are particularly rich artistic materials because their significance is inseparable from time, uncertainty, and potential transformation.

A seed is neither a fully realized plant nor merely an inert object. It represents a future that depends on conditions beyond its own existence: suitable soil, water, light, temperature, and the absence of factors that would prevent germination.

In Paggank Daywaygun, this biological uncertainty becomes part of the artwork’s participatory structure.

The artists can construct the apparatus, program the tracking application, direct participants through the city, and establish the seed-distribution process. They cannot guarantee that a stranger will take a pod, that it will be planted, or that a tree will eventually grow.

The work therefore moves beyond the conventional expectation that an artwork’s meaning and outcome are contained within a completed object or exhibition.

Its consequences may unfold long after the initial performance. A seed pod may remain unclaimed, be carried to another location, be planted, or fail to germinate. These possibilities are not incidental to the project; they are central to its relationship with living systems.

This approach resonates with ecological art practices that work with processes rather than fixed outcomes. In such practices, the artist establishes conditions for change but cannot entirely control the forces that determine what follows.

The artwork consequently occupies a threshold between artistic intention and ecological agency.

Its success cannot be measured exclusively by whether participants complete the assigned route or activate the machine. Nor can the number of seed pods distributed, by itself, establish whether the project has achieved ecological restoration.

A more expansive evaluation would consider the relationships the work creates: whether it makes hidden urban histories perceptible, whether it prompts participants to reconsider their environment, whether seeds reach suitable planting sites, and whether the project establishes any lasting ecological effects.

These outcomes operate on different timescales. The machine responds immediately; a participant’s understanding may change over hours or years; a tree, if established, may grow over decades.

The project brings these timescales into contact without pretending that they are equivalent.

Its most radical proposition may therefore be that an artwork can initiate a process whose meaning is inseparable from outcomes that its makers cannot fully predict or possess.

7. Public space, the commons, and the ethics of intervention

The project’s use of subway handrails introduces a political and ethical dimension to its ecological ambition.

Public transportation systems are shared environments, but they are not unregulated spaces. They are governed by safety requirements, maintenance procedures, accessibility considerations, and rules concerning what may be attached to infrastructure.

The act of hanging a seed pod on a handrail therefore occupies an ambiguous position between artistic intervention, public distribution, and the appropriation of shared space.

Conceptually, the gesture asks who has the authority to determine what public infrastructure is for. Can a system designed for transportation also serve as a vehicle for ecological exchange? Can an ordinary object encountered during a commute become an invitation to participate in a larger environmental process?

These questions connect the work to broader debates about the urban commons: the shared spaces, resources, and infrastructures through which collective life is organized.

The seed pod introduces a possible use that is neither part of the subway’s formal transportation function nor entirely separate from it. It relies on the infrastructure’s accessibility and circulation to bring an ecological proposition into contact with a wider public.

However, an important distinction must be maintained between reimagining public space and assuming unrestricted permission to intervene in it. An environmentally motivated gesture is not automatically harmless, particularly if objects obstruct accessibility, create safety concerns, or introduce seeds of unsuitable species into an ecosystem.

The project description does not establish the precise species, planting protocols, or permissions involved in the seed distribution. Consequently, its ecological intentions should be distinguished from demonstrated ecological outcomes.

This qualification does not diminish the conceptual value of the work. Rather, it reveals an important tension within socially engaged environmental art: the desire to intervene constructively in shared environments must be balanced against the responsibilities that accompany such interventions.

The work’s invitation to redistribute seeds can thus be read as both an imaginative proposition and an ethical question about how individuals participate in the management of shared urban space.

8. Algorithmic direction and the question of agency

The custom GPS application introduces another philosophical tension: the relationship between autonomous action and algorithmically directed behavior.

Participants are invited to undertake a journey, but that journey is structured by an application that calculates routes and directs their movements. Their participation is active, yet the framework through which their actions acquire significance is established by the artists.

This arrangement recalls a central problem in interactive media: the distinction between freedom to act within a system and freedom to determine the system’s rules.

The participants choose to engage with the project and physically carry out its instructions. Nevertheless, their movements become meaningful within the artwork through a computational framework they did not design.

This relationship is not necessarily oppressive. The application can be understood as a tool that makes a complex, distributed project possible. But it also demonstrates that algorithms are not merely neutral mechanisms for organizing information. They structure attention, direct movement, and establish relationships between actions and outcomes.

In this case, algorithmic direction is repurposed toward an ecological objective. A technology commonly associated with navigation and efficiency becomes a means of connecting people to historical memory, material redistribution, and collective participation.

The work thereby raises a larger question about technological agency: rather than asking only what algorithms can do, it asks what kinds of relationships they can be designed to support.

Can a location-based system encourage participants to perceive the city as an ecological environment rather than simply a space to traverse? Can computation connect individual actions to collective projects whose outcomes unfold over time? Can digital infrastructure be used to make the material histories of a place more visible?

Paggank Daywaygun explores these possibilities by turning the algorithm into a mediator between geographical movement, mechanical response, and ecological potential.

9. A distributed artwork: from gallery object to urban network

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The project’s multiple locations and participants challenge the idea that an artwork must be contained within a single physical object or exhibition space.

The machine is located at Harvestworks, but the work’s activity extends through the city. Governors Island provides its ecological and historical reference; Manhattan’s subway system provides a circulation network; participants provide physical movement; the application coordinates their journeys; and seed pods create opportunities for further encounters.

The artwork is therefore better understood as a distributed system than as a single sculpture.

Each component contributes something different. The machine provides a visible and audible point of response. The GPS application establishes connections between locations. The subway network creates opportunities for circulation. The seeds introduce a biological process that may continue after the exhibition ends.

The work’s identity emerges from the relationships among these elements rather than from any one of them in isolation.

This is significant within the history of participatory and networked media art. The artwork does not merely depict a network; it uses a network to operate. Its physical, digital, social, and ecological components are linked through the actions of participants.

The project’s distributed structure also complicates conventional ideas of artistic authorship. The artists initiate the system, but the resulting activity depends on participants and circumstances beyond their direct control.

A seed pod’s future may be determined by someone who never sees the machine. A mechanical response may be activated by a participant who never witnesses the seed-distribution process. The historical reference may be encountered by someone who knows nothing about the algorithm that directed another person’s journey.

The work’s meaning is therefore dispersed across encounters that may remain incomplete or disconnected from one another.

This fragmentation is not necessarily a limitation. It can be understood as an artistic strategy that reflects the complexity of urban life, in which people, materials, and histories intersect without becoming fully visible to one another.

The project creates a framework for those encounters while leaving their ultimate significance open.

10. The philosophical impact: from technological connectivity to ecological responsibility

The deeper significance of Paggank Daywaygun lies in its attempt to redirect technological connectivity toward ecological and historical awareness.

GPS, mobile applications, subway networks, and mechanical systems are commonly associated with efficiency, navigation, communication, and control. The project places these systems in the service of a different set of questions: What histories have been displaced by urban development? What forms of life have disappeared from the city? How might ordinary movements through public space become opportunities for ecological participation?

The work does not simply oppose technology to nature. Its approach is more complicated. It uses technological systems to reveal material connections between urban infrastructure and ecological history, then invites participants to use those systems to redistribute seeds.

Technology becomes a means of reconnecting what urban development has separated.

At the same time, the project does not offer a simple solution to ecological loss. The distribution of seed pods cannot, on its own, restore an ecosystem or repair the historical dispossession associated with the transformation of Indigenous landscapes. The work’s significance lies instead in its capacity to make these histories tangible and to propose a form of participation that extends beyond observation.

It creates an encounter with ecological restoration as a process rather than a completed achievement.

The participant’s journey becomes an act of historical inquiry. The machine translates movement into a physical event. The seed pod carries the possibility of future growth. The subway becomes a potential network for redistributing that possibility.

Each action is limited in isolation, but the project connects them into a larger system of potential consequences.

Ultimately, Paggank Daywaygun asks whether the infrastructures that organize contemporary life can be reimagined as instruments of ecological reciprocity. It proposes that urban space is not merely a setting for human activity but a living and historically layered environment in which movement, memory, material, and biological life remain interconnected.

Its philosophical contribution is to shift the participant’s role from that of a spectator who receives a representation of history to that of an agent who enters a process of possible change.

The work’s future remains uncertain, but that uncertainty is precisely what distinguishes ecological participation from the production of a predetermined artistic object.

11. An integrated conceptual reading

The following synthesis connects the project’s principal elements to their broader philosophical implications.

Element of the project	Conceptual significance
Governors Island’s relocated soil	Material history, urban transformation, and the displacement of matter
The name Paggank	Indigenous place-memory and the relationship between language and ecology
Disappearing nut trees	Ecological loss, historical change, and the possibility of restoration
GPS-tracking application	Locative media, algorithmic direction, and the mediation of movement
Nut-shooting machine	Translation of data into physical action, sound, and kinetic expression
Subway lines and handrails	Public infrastructure as a potential network for ecological redistribution
Seed pods containing soil	Biological potential, material circulation, and uncertain futures
Participation by gallery visitors and strangers	Distributed authorship, collective agency, and unpredictable outcomes
The overall network	The interdependence of technology, history, public space, and living systems

The project’s philosophical achievement lies in its integration of these elements into a single participatory framework. Historical memory is materialized through soil and seeds; movement becomes computational information; information becomes mechanical action; and the subway becomes a potential means of circulating biological life.

Rather than presenting ecology as a subject to be contemplated from a distance, the work makes ecological history something participants can engage with through their own movements and decisions.

Its ultimate proposition is that the city contains histories and ecological possibilities that ordinary patterns of movement tend to conceal. By redirecting those patterns, the artwork creates an opportunity to encounter the city differently: not merely as an engineered environment for human circulation, but as a complex, evolving system of materials, memories, organisms, and relationships.