For my second bridge project, I worked with a partner to create a visual and auditory piece based on two experiences. The first experience was walking through New York with ear plugs in, and the second experience was sitting in Washington Square Park with our eyes closed. I detailed my observations and thoughts on the second experience in my Seminar writing below:
“It seems like such a simple thing, to close your eyes and just be. We do it every night when we go to bed, and we do it for hours at a time. But this was different.
As my partner, Eunice, surpassed five minutes on the timer – 5 minutes of being completely still – I could see her starting to get restless, asking for the time every few minutes, until she finally let go at 8 minutes. She opened her eyes and looked surprised as she expressed that “everything looks so green!” and laughed. Having deprived herself of her sense of sight, her eyes took a moment to adjust to the landscape in front of her, which mainly comprised of bright green trees and a few concrete structures such as the ground and the stone fountain centered on top of it. “It was weird,” she noted, “not necessarily uncomfortable, but weird”. Understanding my interest in how she adapted to her surroundings after giving up sight, she described that she focused on and became more sensitive to sound, which she felt was the most dominant aspect of her experience. She expressed that she felt as though the park was very crowded and there were a lot more people around her, when in reality the area was empty, and only a couple dozen people were sitting on the park benches and around the fountain. Being sensitive to sound, she also said that the sounds felt much louder when her eyes were closed than when she could see, and she was able to focus on people’s conversations behind her, and listen to a variety of languages being spoken, such as Spanish, French and Cantonese. As she listened to the seemingly louder sounds, mainly those made by people, she visualised crowds of people walking near her and sitting down near us while chatting. “I think I also heard a baby at one point,” she added. Aside from sound, one other sense stood out to her: touch. Being in such an open space, she was able to feel the chilly wind brush up against her skin.
Then it was my turn. I closed my eyes and almost immediately felt the amplification of the most dominant sound in the park – the fountain. Initially facing my partner, my left ear could hear the hundreds of droplets sprouting to the top and hurriedly cascading into the flat surface, and I turned to face the sound, while visualising this scene. My ears tried to search for other individual sounds to pick up on, and each began to amplify upon their identification. The slightly broken whirring of bicycle wheels as they rolled past me, reminded me of my study of the Doppler Effect in my high school Physics lesson, as I noted the changes in its volume when it got closer to me and then further again. The chirping of the birds would come and go every couple of seconds, impossible to miss each time it returned, as its high pitch stood out over the dull, muffled sound of traffic and construction in the distant streets. Diverting my attention to these distant streets, I could also hear the the echo of dogs barking, and a deep, blurry sound that I couldn’t define as either an airplane or a truck.
Similarly to Eunice I also felt as though the park was more crowded than it actually was, and I was able to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations, unable to comprehend some amongst the array of different languages. The aspect of the experience that stood out to me the most, was how I could differentiate the ways people walked through the sound of their shoes. Some would drag their feet, producing a rough, scratchy sounds against the floor, while others walked with defined footsteps, which created sharp clacking sounds as their soles hit the concrete.
Having first seen the area around me, and concentrating on small details of each sound, I found myself reconstructing the landscape in my mind. Every sound I heard passed through my ears, and was transformed into an image that I visualised, as if a screen on the inside of my eyelids.
After sound, touch followed as the second most dominant sense in this experience. The wind constantly nudged my oversized jacket against my skin, and pulled my hair across my face, tickling my skin. The cold and dry New York air, slowly took its toll on my lips, and I licked them every now and them to bring back their moisture. Under my hands, I could feel the cold marble bench, smooth against my fingers and palms every time I readjusted my seated position.
Being an incredibly fidgety person, I struggled to stay in the calm state of just being still in my surroundings. But without the luxury of seeing where I could move, I felt constrained to a minimal space around me, rarely allowing myself to move, in worry of touching or knocking something I shouldn’t, so I resorted to fidgeting to the closest thing to me – my phone case. Additionally, without being in the comfort of a very familiar space such as my own room, a slightly uncomfortable feeling grew in me as my personal belongings weren’t within sight or reach.
I grew increasingly fidgety as time slowly passed by, and soon opened my eyes as the timer read 7 minutes. Like Eunice, I was surprised at the overwhelming colour washed in front of me, but unlike Eunice, I saw blue rather than green. We identified that this was because the scene in front of her was mostly trees, whereas there was mainly the grey concrete floor and buildings in the direction I was facing.
Despite my restless and impatient personality, I will admit to finding a certain serenity in letting go of my sight and allowing myself to focus on senses that I would often neglect in these sort of landscapes, as I would usually be distracted by the excitement and vitality that I can see rather than hear.”
After we both discussed out observations, we realised we both had the feeling that the space we were in felt incredibly crowded and close to us when we had our eyes closed. So, we decided to create an installation that would allow the viewers to feel the same way.
Using pins and thread, we created shapes based off the sounds we think we heard, and made the most dominant sounds out of darker coloured thread and filled in the shapes, whereas the fainter sounds were made using lighter coloured thread and hide slightly ambiguous shapes. We chose to use thread because thread is a material that gets tangled easily, so we thought it would effectively symbolise the chaotic sounds scape of Washington Square Park. We also created wire faces to represent the most dominant aspect of the first experience, which was the vague, muffled chatter we could hear for a split second as people were near us when they walked past. Below are images of each of the four walls inside the box:
Initially, we had intended to either hang the box or stick one side of it to a wall, however the box was too heavy for other of these options, so we balanced it between two tables and had the audience crawl underneath as shown below:
We also played a sound recording of Washington Square Park while people were inside the box to authenticate the atmosphere of Washington Square Park.
I think the piece turned out to be quite successful as my classmates all said they felt exactly what I wanted them to feel: the feeling of being overwhelmed by how close the walls of the box are.
