For the second bridge project, we had to deprive ourselves of one of our senses for a certain period of time in order to experience a change or intensification in our other senses. We chose to represent what we felt when we were blindfolded in Washington Square Park.
Clare and I had a similar experience, we were very overwhelmed by all the sounds we heard. Sophia had a particular experience, her synesthesia manifested while she was blindfolded and she learned that when she heard people’s voices she could see their “colors”.
For this project, we chose to make a visual representation of the sounds that we heard during the exercise and make the audience feel overwhelmed by it, just as we felt by the noise of New York.
Sophia chose to represent people’s voices, she worked with wire and different fabrics that represented the colors that she saw when she heard them speak. Clare chose to represent the construction noise that she heard when she was blindfolded, she chose to work with wood and nails. When I was blindfolded I heard so many noises I wanted to stop the exercise, I tried to separate the sounds to know why was everything so loud and I started to hear a loud background noise. The only way I could describe it was as the sound of a vacuum cleaner. I chose to represent that background noise with wire mesh and normal wire, just taking up place in our piece and enclosing the other elements.
In order to put it together, we wanted to make a wooden cuboid that in a way trapped a small section of the sounds we heard. Representing a big portion of the New York noise trapped in a box so we could show our class what we heard. We were very lucky to find a big wooden desk on the street to use as our main material so we decided that to make the visual representation as overwhelming as the sounds were to us, we should make a big scale project. We cut and stained the wood before putting it all together and start hanging our separate pieces. After we had that part ready we chose to tie everything with a lot of thread to make our individual pieces interact with each other just as the sounds did in reality. We used red thread for the voices, blue for the “background noise” and purple for the construction noises. Separating them in a way but making them have a similar appearance at first sight.
For the presentation of our project, we decided that it would be a good experience for the class to use earplugs to experience our piece and try to imagine sounds just by looking at the visual representations of them. In a way doing the opposite of what we had to do to create the project: hear noises and imagine visual representations of them. We put the piece on top of a table so the spectator had to sit in a chair looking up just to intensify the overwhelming sensation that we wanted to induce. For the same reason, we decided to have the lights off and to crack the window a little bit to light the piece from below, making it seem even bigger.
