Fallowfield

The archives pavilion turned out to be a temporary exhibit. Our guy sorts his Haikus from Hussain’s pavilion by sticking them between the six curved wooden members that join to create the structure. The pavilion also serves as a bus stop, providing a little change from the normal rectangular aesthetics of OC Transpo. Its curved shell shape creates an effective acoustic environment so our guy can hum what he composed at Kristen’s pavilion.

After he is finished, the transfers stay in the bus stop. People can look at them and take them if they wish. If not taken, rain and wind will eventually weather the transfers out. When all the transfers are gone, our guy, who comes every couple of weeks to check the archives, sorts a new exhibit.

The pavilion provides several elements of control for our guy to use. First, three rows of light fixtures create gradient between light and dark spots on the interior surfaces of the wood. Second, the pavilion is not very high and although a person 1.8 meters tall can stand up straight in the centre he will have to bend more and more as he gets closer to the sides. Our guy knows about these characteristics and uses them by putting the haikus he’d like people to pay more attention to on the easy to read spots.

Now the question is – when our guy gets old, is anyone going to replace him? Does he have an apprentice?

All this and more in…

THE NEXT SEMESTER (dramatic music, fade out, credits)

fin

What used to be here

Collage:

The first question to ask is – what does our guy do in Fallowfield station right now, when there’s no pavilion there. Matt suggested that he collects used transfers as well as objects and I really like that idea. What can a transfer be used for after it expires? Well, a transfer has information printed on it (in this order): time of expiry (an hour and a half after its been issued), two letters that I think are code for the day, full date, and a serial number. As a starting point, I think this information can be used to document what happened during the day. Our guy writes on each transfer he uses, but he can’t write too much since there’s not a lot of room – so he has to be focused and economical with words. What does he write? That’s up to him. Some transfers may be used to catalog his objects, others for different documentation. But what’s important is that when he comes to Fallowfield once or twice a year, he takes all the transfers he collected with all the notes on them and assembles a gigantic calendar, each day made up of several transfers, full of information of what happened that day. It may look like a diary written for the city from a certain perspective – that of someone whose purpose is to examine it every day.

update 29 Nov

After reading an essay about libraries in context to a book called The Name of the Rose, I learned about the differences between the modern type library and the classic type. In the modern kind (such as a university library), patrons search for books using computer terminals and a national (international?) cataloging system; in classic archives (such as the national archives), patrons must consult the librarian – the only person (or people) who understand what is in the archive and how to find it. I decided to let our guy be the second kind of librarian.

He hums. That has potential. Although no one is able to understand his archives without his help, people can hear his music, composed throughout the six month that took him to collect transfers. How does music affect people? Usually the effect is described in abstract or sensual ways – a person might say a song makes him happy or sad, sleepy or excited, bored or inspired. This abstract sensation is interesting to me because it may carry what our guy has learned in his daily investigation (collecting stories), but not in a literal way (that is, people don’t understand what he learned, just how that makes him feel).

I decided our guy buries his transfers in the field next to the train station. I’d like to create a space for him that will not only carry his humming all the way to the bus stop, but also assist him in his work while assuring his comfort (physically and mentally). For this reason I’d like the space to be shaped as the hole he is making – as a shallow cave, connected with some audio conductor to the bus stop.

(more update!)

Thinking about it all for the past couple of hours, I am trying to focus my design, mainly trying to figure what it would offer our guy. I’m also thinking about possible connections with my installation.

One of the conclusions I got from the investigation of my installation is that people work hard to maintain what’s their’s, or pay for the maintenance, but the result is still a sense of ownership. Then they can sit down in their living room or garden chair and look at what they accomplished. When I finished building my installation at Kosmic I set there for about 20 minutes to see what I made. Same happened with the Gravel Lawn installation. So I think it makes sense that our guy, after working hard on his archive, sits down and looks at what he made at the end of the day, just before finally burying it.

So this is what I’m planning for my design to achieve:

1) A place for our guy to organize his transfers in the way he see fit (see next par.)

2) A place for him to sit on (a chair? a mound?) and look at what he made.

How does he organize his transfers? I think it should be a personal way of organization that only he is able to understand. Furthermore, I think it shouldn’t be organized by days and dates. Our guy gets different sensetions from his experiences, and those evolve into different types of hykoos. On the most basic level, his hykoos can be catagorized as “happy” or “sad”. But then each of those can be broken down: happy can be either “love” or “beauty” or “fun”; sad can be “melancholy” or “pain”. Now different categories are realized between the two extreme. Where, for example, is “nostalgia” on the scale between happy and sad? Interesting poems, usually, are not entirely happy or entirely sad but rather a mix of the two, made in different ways. So to sum up, our guy has his own categories for the hykoos he writes, but they are deep to the extant that only he is able to tell which poems falls into which category – much the same as an architecture historian understanding of different styles and eras, and which buildings fall into which. Using that analogy is interesting, since most buildings don’t really belong to a style but fall between two or three stylistic categories, and the same happens with our guy’s poems.

Confusing? Well, as I said, he’s the only person able to understand his organization.

Here are some sketches (click to see full size)

(late night addition)

(this thing is keeping me up)

Why does he bury the transfers?

Because he wants to make room (in his storage and pockets) for the next 6 months. Spring cleaning.

I think the cycle, with this idea, is now closed.