With the exception of when I create improvised drawings, I tend to create elaborate and fully formed project ideas in my head. Sometimes I realize the projects as envisioned, sometimes they change bigtime.
I am posting my proposal now so that later I can report on the process of change. This may be a foolish thing to do. What do you think?
My proposal is inspired by the peculiar disconnection from social space that is the product of MacArthur BART Station's function as a transfer point. Everyday thousands of people pass through this spatial location but are severely limited in their experience of the local environment. Their rigidly scheduled movements have no connection to local time. The culture of the act of transfer is one in which experience is disposable and the people one interacts with are interchangeable. In some ways this represents a bleak scene of post-industrial alienation, yet the anonymity of public transportation is liberating; there is freedom to experiment with the performance of one's self in these peculiar "neither here nor there" spaces.
This dissociative location and ambiguous social space have parallels in Dan Sanders' story about the MacArthur BART Station. The readers are told of of an architect's attempts to convince the City of Oakland to build an enormously overambitious building on the site. The way in which the story does not divulge whether it is fictional or historical fact is compounded by the main character's refusal to acknowledge the need for truth about whether or not the building has been realized. This character has the potential to defuse the issues embodied by another stymied architect, Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," often cited by those who place individuality over all other moral values. This inspires me to create a monument to the grace and humility which are the under-recognized opportunities inherent in the process of depersonalization.
For my contribution to the artist's tour I propose creating a process piece that will result in documentation in the form of objects and a video. For one day, from the time the BART opens until it closes, I will remain in the BART system, transferring as many times as I can through the MacArthur Station, walking West to East so as to capture the unique skyline of the mountains over Oakland. I will film the process of walking from the moment the doors open on one train car, until I arrive at the far wall of the other train car. While walking I will attempt to film the mountains and the people around me with the shutter speed set to low so as to emphasize the blur between separate sources of light.
I will also gather from the area immediately outside the BART Station small, humble, discarded objects (limited to non-reactive solids). These I will film in such a way as to appreciate the detail of their unique form.
The two scenes will be edited together so the footage of each transfer experience is followed by the footage of a discarded object. This video is intended to be displayed at the gallery during the period of the exhibition. Sound is not an essential element of this video, although I may include the ambient sounds recorded while transferring.
Furthermore, I will create "souvenir" objects consisting of a stencil of the Oakland skyline in black on white, a still image of a person from the footage of the transfer experience, and one of the discarded objects. Please see the attached image "macarthur proposal.jpg."
I am open to refining this idea with the input of others involved in the Invisible Cities Audio Tour, and reserve the right to make changes based on discoveries made during the process of creation.
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