I had a dream last night, clear as life and fully remembered. I was creating a new modern art piece for a museum, and it was focused on the snippets of conversation that float through public spaces. Here’s how it would work: arrays of directional microphones would be placed in the public areas of the museum, like the gift shop, entrance, outside the restrooms, corridors, and entrances to exhibits. Each mic would feed back to a computer with talk-to-text software which would then send fragments of text to projectors and screens mounted throughout the exhibit space. Some text would be projected on the floor, some on walls, some on hanging fabric, some on glass, some on spinning fan blades. It might be difficult to read, just as it’s difficult to hear everyone’s conversations as you pass them. Sometimes the software would misinterpret words, just as you do when you pass by someone.
To counter the concerns of privacy, this is nothing more than an amplification of what people have said in the public realm. The text could also be delayed by several hours or days so people wouldn’t see their own spoken thoughts projected.
The concept of the piece is a pure visualization of the multiple layers, fragments, and snippets of thoughts and stories that we walk through every day in crowded spaces. You can never hear a complete thought but you can often begin to form a whole of what concerns people on a daily basis, what they discuss as they wait for the bathroom, or pay for tickets, or walk into a museum. As they enter are they discussing the exhibit or the high cost of tickets or their dinner plans or the approaching storm outside? Do people say intensely personal things in public spaces assuming that nobody can hear them? What do you say?
Writer, architect, father, husband.