A Forgotten 9/11 Tape Art Memorial Returns to the Internet

For nearly twenty years, The Hope Project was entombed within a pile of external hard-drives at the Tape Art studio. "It's a project that literally just disappeared," said Tape Art founder Michael Townsend. Just in time to commemorate the 25th of 9/11, The Hope Project has found new life thanks to a savvy tech entrepreneur, a quirky documentary, and the unwavering commitment of an artist collective. Now, you can retrace this guerilla-style art project through the streets of Manhattan.

We spoke with the leaders of the Tape Art collective, Michael Townsend and Leah Smith, about The Hope Project's creation, its disappearance and recovery, and what exactly tape art is.

What is Tape Art?

Townsend started "taping" in Providence, Rhode Island, over 30 years ago. "We discovered that tape was an excellent medium for changing surfaces, for making basically temporary graffiti," he said.

Townsend and his group of artist friends worked under the cover of night to install their work, then returned 24 hours later to take it down and put up a fresh piece.

"Because we were in this cycle of removing the work and replacing it, we sent the signal that we weren't there to destroy or make anything permanent," he said, "so we were just left alone."

This freedom allowed the crew to perfect their art, get faster, better, and bigger. "Within a of couple years...other cities got wind and we started getting invited to arts festivals and museums."

"Once you have a medium of art where you can literally go into any space and change it, it is a blessing and a curse," said Leah Smith, who joined the Tape Art crew in 2011. "It's very powerful. Every space now has endless possibilities."

Tape Art as Community Engagement

"One of the most important things the tape does is it gives you a sense of control and it gives you a chance to be seen," Townsend said. "There are certain circumstances where those things are robbed from you and this medium helps bring it back for a little bit."

Much of Townsend and Smith's work involves community engagement, whether they are conducting workshops with children in schools, with seniors at an elder care facility, or with patients in a hospital.

"We got thrust into doing [memorial] work because we were in circumstances where communities were experiencing tragedy," Townsend reflected. "We were in Oklahoma City when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building had been bombed [in 1995] and we worked with the local children's hospital and the schools near the blast site and we did a mural by invitation at the center of the rescue operation. We really internalized that this medium has a unique benefit in those scenarios."

The Hope Project

At the time of the September 11th attacks in 2001, Tape Art had a studio in Jersey City, just across the river from the World Trade Center. To mourn the unthinkable tragedy that transpired in front of their eyes, the team embarked on the creation of The Hope Project, a guerrilla-style street art memorial made of tape silhouette portraits.

The initial impulse was to draw tape murals of every victim, but in the days and weeks after the attack, that number fluctuated wildly. The team learn that many of the rescue workers they met during the Oklahoma City tragedy years had earlier perished in the 9/11 attacks. When Townsend saw the list of deceased firefighters published in The New York Times, the artists decided to focus their efforts on the known casualties, a group of 490 firefighters, airline passengers, and crew members.

For the next five years, life-sized silhouettes made of tape popped up on the sides of stoops, on the windows of convenience stores, on rocks in Central Park, and in other surprising locations throughout Manhattan.

The placement of each figure was far from random. The Tape Art team meticulously mapped four heart shapes over the Manhattan street grid, then walked the streets to find the best locations along those routes to place the murals.

One time, the route landed in The Lake at Central Park. Unwilling to stray from this path, the artists sculpted a silhouette out of sticks and tape and floated it out to the center of The Lake with the help of a fellow New Yorker in a canoe. This piece honored Sara Elizabeth Low.

"We never drew a person without having spent a considerable amount of time reading about them," Townsend said. The team did its best to match physical descriptions of the victims, taking into consideration their height, hairstyle, any visual elements that could add a subtle difference.

"The effort is always to make the person look as alive and lively as possible," Smith added.

Looking at the figures, you'll notice they are all holding up their fingers as if counting. They are. Collectively, these 490 figures represent the thousands of other victims with their finger counts.

The Digital Archive

Tape art murals are temporary. Some of the murals came down immediately, while others stuck around for a few months. The longest surviving mural was that of Vincent Princiotta on Staple Street between Harrison Street and Jay Street. Tucked away in an alley and covered with newer layers of graffiti, it lasted for six years.

The artists thoroughly documented each mural and marked them on a map with "excruciating accuracy." To preserve these ephemeral pieces, the Tape Art team created a website that would serve, they hoped, as a permanent repository. A core group of eight artists worked on the project continuously for five years, racking up over 30,000 hours of computer work.

The site, tape.com/hope went live in 2005. On the website, visitors could find a map of all the murals and photographs of each piece, alongside more than 19 hours of audio that contained stories of the victims and insights into the mural's creation. The team synced the audio to QuickTime panoramas that put the viewer straight into New York City.

Unfortunately, this painstakingly made site soon started to break down. Rapidly advancing technologies soon made the images, video, and audio formats obsolete. iPhones and social media platforms that would come to dominate the internet were incompatible with the slow and meditative intent of the project. By 2009, the site had gone dark.

Recovery of The Hope Project

The Hope Project made a brief appearance in the 2024 documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which featured Townsend and a group of friends who built a hidden apartment inside the Providence Place Mall. This big-screen debut created new interest in the project, and with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 on the horizon, the loss of the project weighed on the Tape Art team.

"We'd been reached out to by a couple of different people with interest in helping us to rebuild the site, but the thing that we kept responding with was that we needed more than just help with a little h," Smith said. "We needed help with a big H."

All of the elements of the project were trapped on a stack of external hard-drives in the studio, but the team didn't have the time or know-how to recover the files.

Gordon Wintrob was one of the Secret Mall Apartment viewers who reached out with interest in the 9/11 memorial. Luckily for the Tape Art team, Wintrob is a technology writer and Chief Technology Officer with the skills they needed.

Mere weeks ago, the team handed Wintrob all of their data. With the help of AI, he was able to quickly restore their content and create a new interactive website, eleventhofseptember.com.

"It really does feel like a resurrection," Smith said.

On the website, visitors can interact with the Tape Art team's original hand-drawn maps and click on specific pinpoints to unveil the mural at each location. Each mural has a dedicated page filled with photographs and an audio podcast, along with a list of the people honored at that site.

Viewers can search the site by victims' names or by location. There is also a walk feature you can use on mobile devices to find the mural site closest to your current location.

"It was fascinating opening this website and seeing those videos so easily accessible for the first time and clicking on them and being like, 'My goodness, what a crazy collection of editing and sincerity and authenticity,'" Townsend exclaimed. There may have even been a few tears.

The Hope Project's Legacy

"This is a project that we hope even if you're not somebody who feels directly connected to the 9/11 project, it will remind you that your response [to tragedy] doesn't have to make sense to other people. Your response doesn't have to even make sense to yourself," said Smith.

"This [project] obviously didn't solve anything. It wasn't trying to solve anything other than our own feelings," she continued, but "absurd actions can sometimes be the route towards finding peace."

"Your responses are often incredible insights into the purity of your heart and mind in these moments," Townsend added, "but the difficult thing is following through."

"We as a group of artists made the decision that come hell or high water, we're going to follow through on that initial impulse of kindness. Hopefully that may inspire other people or remind them that you can follow that spark. It just takes a lot of work sometimes," Townsend said. It also takes patience, in this case nearly nearly twenty years, for the right technology and the right people to come around.

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