border equals zero

Overview

1. A project addressing the dwindling of public community spaces in favor of online community.
2. An aggrandizement of the act of withdrawing from the here-and-now via personal electronics.
3. A public art performance involving matching track suits and giant wooden scrollbars that occurred in April 2006, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Process

The assignment for this project was pretty open: make a memorial. As a way to get started, I took a short walk around downtown Providence, and returned home with the idea to memorialize loud, idiotic cellphone conversations. Eventually, I refined my initial impulse to be a project that would address the impact of electronic connectivity on public community.

I decided I had two main points I wanted to communicate:

1. Personal electronic devices can be disruptive: they distract, create noise pollution, cause accidents. When you use them, you forget where you are and who you’re actually with, and public acceptance of the most ridiculous usage of these devices detracts from enjoyment of community spaces.

2. A lot of interaction and community happens via e-communication in lieu of face-to-face communication. I wanted to aggrandize the disconnectedness of a community that chats with screen names in online chat-rooms more than actual, physical neighbors.

Form

I decided to make objects that would reference connectivity in an archetypal way instead of a replicating a specific device.

I built each element, by hand, out of wood, over the course of one week.

The initial photos I took at and near my parents’ home on Long Island attempted to integrate the interface elements with the environment.

But they got me thinking that I needed to put these things on the sidewalk, really get them in people’s way.

The public performance I put together had a few of my friends cart these around downtown Providence.

We invaded an upscale apartment building, a cafe, a construction site, the bus plaza

All in all, I took over one hundred photos of the performance, which can be viewed on my old flickr account.

Installation

This project was shown in the RISD Design Gallery in the Setting the Site class show in May 2006, in the Woods-Gerry Gallery in the Graphic Design Triennial Show in the fall of 2006, and at the Sol Koffler Gallery from October 19 to November 4, 2007 as part of the graphic design graduate show, Continuum. (Exhibition photo courtesy RISD Graphic Design.)