It could start with a street number that collides with the date of a birth.

Years ago, on my first day in New York, I walked into 324 First Avenue after dropping off my luggage at the rented apartment in nearby Cooper Village. Knowing almost nothing of the city and starving after the transpacific flight, I walked in and grabbed a bagel for no better reason than that my father's birthday was March 24th.

It was in another life, but the remembrance of it keeps flaring itself up with subsequent findings: 324 First Avenue was not merely a bagel shop, but the original home of Ess-a-Bagel, a New York institution (No wonder I had been standing in line in the early dark that day, "they must love Bagels!") that had been there since 1976, a year after my father was born.

Then, if I dare to write down an autobiography, this uncannily anecdotal story I had told enough could become a durable mark. To tell it at all, I must have reduced the street to a string of numbered buildings and fenced plots. In defense of a stranger, the reduction stripes away the sediment of ingrained local knowledge and makes room for establishing inchoate associations with an irrelevant past, a past irrelevant, at least, to the place itself.

Street numbers or bus routes, the tiniest bits of text on signs or bulletin boards—I have come to call such granular urban details that survive this reduction Perception Anchors. After all, an anchor has to catch on something. It comes into being through a doubling: a geographical mark on one side, and an otherwise unrelated episode of personal history on the other.

Beyond all other considerations, Perception Anchor reveals a small mechanism by which memory persists when it can no longer be sustained by a single settled geography. This website serves as a read-write system built around a growing shared library of perception anchors: records seeded from existing data and expanded through human contribution. Users can observe this mechanism by navigating relations within the library, and participate in it by adding their own anchors wherever they perceive a relation.

This site starts with Wilshire Boulevard, most of it in Los Angeles, and 227 of its address plaques, which I photographed in 2025 and later included in Boulevard, The Word We Got Used To. Down on Wilshire, I was settled for once at the Miracle Mile part and stumbled into this way of locating a personal history. They become the first records of this database. From here, the numbers will lead you in.

- Kristopher Shi, 2026

Scroll

Browse across the system in any direction with a trackpad or mouse.

Hover

Hover over any record to preview the silhouettes of all connected records before following them.

Click

Click into and focus on one anchor to reveal its directly connected records. Continue from any of them to explore further.

Add your anchors

A perception anchor marks a point of recall: a detail in one record that prompts another memory. We invite you to add one whenever something in an existing record brings a memory, place, date, image, or event of your own to mind.

Right-click an anchor or open Add Anchors from the footer to extend it with a connection of your own. Choose one of three ways to make the connection (address, written trace, images). Once added, your record is immediately visible to other visitors. After approval, it is also archived in the shared library.

Connect existing anchors

You can also connect anchors already in the database. Right-click an anchor to open the Add Anchors panel, then choose Connect to an Existing Anchor. This enters selection mode, where you can follow the on-screen prompts to establish the connection. Once connected, the two anchors are linked by a dashed line that appears when either anchor is hovered over or clicked into.

Start Over

Use Start Over button in the top-right corner to clear all active selections and revealed connections to begin a new exploration on Wilshire Boulevard. Existing records and connections remain unchanged in the database.

The 227 Wilshire Boulevard street-number images that seeded Perception Anchor were first published in Boulevard, The Word We Got Used To in 2026 by possibly probably perhaps.

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Project

Perception Anchor is an independent read-write system and growing library for tracing relations formed through acts of recall.

Initiated, designed, and built by Kristopher Yizhen Shi.

Research, interface design, system design, writing, and web development by Kristopher Yizhen Shi.

Seed Data

The library was initiated with 227 street-number photographs made along Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles County, in 2025. The images were originally published in Boulevard, The Word We Got Used To, possibly probably perhaps, Los Angeles, 2026.

© 2026 Kristopher Yizhen Shi for the images.
Publication edition © 2026 possibly probably perhaps.

The initial records are extended with publicly accessible geographic and archival material from the following sources:

OpenStreetMap / Overpass API
Geographic and address data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Data queried through the Overpass API.

Internet Archive / Item Metadata API
Archival metadata and media accessed through the Internet Archive Item Metadata API. Copyright and reuse conditions vary by individual source item.

Library Contributions

The library continues to grow through records and connections contributed by its users and accepted through the review process.

Contributors are credited by the names provided with submissions approved for the library. Anonymous submissions are not listed. Adding a connection alone does not add a name to this list.

Rights

Copyright in user-contributed texts and media remains with their respective contributors unless otherwise stated.

Externally sourced material remains subject to the copyright, licensing, and reuse conditions specified by its original creators, collections, or data providers.

© 2026 Kristopher Yizhen Shi. Perception Anchor.

The reviewed Perception Anchor library is available as structured data for further study, interpretation, and reuse.

Download JSON
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Downloads include library records, metadata, and relational data. Rights to associated media remain subject to the terms stated in the Credits and individual records.

The public download contains the published collection and reviewed contributions that remain public. Pending and withdrawn contributions are excluded. CSV includes separate record and connection rows; JSON preserves the complete structured metadata.