Group members:
Sophie
Jonas
Signe L
Signe Cecilie
1. The Concept: Mobile Home
Pattern: Marks
Layer: Publicness
Activity: Relaxing
In order to create a RELAXING space in a PUBLIC place, we will leave several MARKS around town to constitute this event.
We will create a relaxing atmosphere in the public space, by placing homely furnitures, pictures, carpets etc. in order to give people the opportunity to escape the busy, stressful everyday life of the big city. People can then sit in this little cosy private space, drink some coffee and eat some cake and just relax in the this intimate contempoary zone for a while and then continue on with the daily rutines, work, shopping ect.
Our concept is to create this homely atmosphere in different mainstream high street public places like Strøget, Store Torv and the Railway station. Places where people are moving from one place to another, transphere areas were everything is running fast in short matter of time. In contrast to the busy crouded public places, we are also planning to install our project "Mobile Home" in a more downbeat environment like Klostertorv or Pustervigtorv and figure out if people are acting differently in more quite places in the urban space.
The real material we are carrying around with us, can be compared with another mobile device like a cell phone, an Ipod or a GPS. The funitures is another kind of mobile thing in which we create this intimate, relaxed and homely sphere right in the center of downtown Århus. We have re-materialized peoples private "bubble" in the public space by making a new physical place for people to feel at home or just relaxed. The mobile phone is, as the name implies, an inconstant and superficial object and therefore it is paradoxical when we will have people using this specific tool in order to locate the homely, the profound and more constant.
This event will take place in the afternoon on friday the 4th of April, where people are off for the weekend and just drifting around in the city or on their way home from work. As advertising we will mark this event with stickers around town with a cell phone number so that people can write us, and then we will tell them when and where to go to relax for a while. Otherwise we can use the mobile technology in the actuel event by integrate peoples mobile phone in the whole setting. When people take this time to relax in our Mobile Home, they get the opportunity to send a personal massage, a SMS to a person their have not been talking to in a long time or just a sweet massage to a goog friend og family member. The Mobile Home itself is a mark, it marks a zone for relaxing where people can spend a few minutes typing a personal massage. The homely setting is a mark in itself, because it makes people think of some place relaxing, like their own living room. The public living room that we will create, this relaxing sphere where people can feel like home and act as if they are at home, is a temporary intimate/private zone. A zone constantly on the move, like a nomadic home. We are all nomades on the move in a world were nothing is static. (Zygmunt Baumann)
Like this our home could also be refered to as a "Generic Home" keeping Rem Koolhaas in mind.
Koolhaas' "Gerneric City" is a city definded by the (con)temporary. A place where something pops up one moment and dissapears again the next."The Generic City is always founded by people on the move, poised to move on" he says. It is a city of dynamics. Further, as described in the Matt Locke text, our Mobile Home will be more of a constant wave, and not a "separating cocoon". The ides is for people to still be connected with/stay in the public sphere. We discussed putting up walls around the furniture, actually building a home, but the idea is for people mix the private/public spheres (because the two can maybe never really be totally separated?), floating in and out of the two. Something we might do unconsciously everyday?
Erwin Goffman uses the term backstage and frontstage to describe the two spheres in people's lives and behaviour in public compared to their behaviour in the private zone, behind the physical/architectural walls. In our project the private zone is psychologically constructed in the public. In that way people can stay private even though they are in a public place. We do not constitute walls, but create a relaxed atmosphere through the use of homely furnitures which connotate intimacy, privacy, cosyness ect.
1 table (Jonas)
2 chairs (Jonas
1 carpet, cushions (Signe L)
1 standard lamp (Signe L)
1 mobile phone (Sophie)
Magasins, newspapers (Sophie)
1 blanket, coffee cups (Signe C)
cake (We buy it on friday before the event)
Locke:TIZ
Documentation
Friday the 4th from 1.30 to 4.30 pm we performed this project around the center of Århus. These became our locations:
Klostertorv
We started right in the middle of the square, but we soon moved to one of the bus stops on the side. Here we placed our furnitures, made ourselves comfortable and offered people coffee. It was quite a success. The bus stop was already kind of a room, and people there had nothing else to do, since they were just waiting for a bus. All kinds of people came to join us, some just to wait, some to talk, others stopped just to ask what was going on.
Pustervig
Pustervig torv became the next destination for our mobile home installation. The square was empty and quiet, perhaps too quiet for our project. Only a few people passed by, and they didn't seem interested in us. We moved on.
Clemens bro
At Clemens bro we used one of the benches to extend our home a bit. Like at Pustervig torv noone was really interested in sitting down with us, so here we became more of an installation, which was fine as well. There were a lot of facers from Folkekirkens Nødhjælp and some demonstrators walking around trying to get peoples attention, which probably was one of the reasons why people didn't want to stop and talk to us.
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Søndergade, Salling
In front of Salling a group of singers from the Salvation Army was performing, and we considered it a great opportunity to add some entertainment to our mobile home, so we placed our installation just across the street. This gave us some positive responses.
Railway station, main entrance
In front of the main entrance of the railway station there is something like a bubble of small paving stones in the pavement. This bubble would soon become our bubble, as we placed our installation here to make it our final destination. this was a difficult place to get people to sit down, so again we used our home mainly as an installation where we could relax in the middle of the crowd. A few people asked about us, others only had the time to grab a cookie on their way, and a single boy had the time to sit down and talk.
On the mobile people were asked to write 3 things that make them relax, and then send the answers to us….here's some of the things they wrote:
"Music, red wine, soft warmth", "A good book, walks in the forrest, to make advanced cuisine",
"G&Ts, to drink a strong latté in a armchair, sunday morning", "Sunshine, cherries, friends", "Pussy",
"Music, cake, a bed", "To take a shower, to sleep, music", "Bath-tub, beer, to sleep",
"To smoke, to sleep, to take a shower", "To snooze in the morning, movies, beer", "Mette, my bed, cake",
"Food, food and food", "Cake, music, Helle", "ice cream, to yell, to play it cool", "Candle lights and coffee",
"Music, friend, food", "Loud rock music, chocolate ice cream, friends",
The Mobile Home project in retrospective
If we were suppose to chance something on our project it would probably be the feature with the mobile messages.
In fact we were all rather surprised of the outcome of the project. It was great fun and an exciting experience for all of us.
Especially our first stop on our tour, at the bus stops turned out surprisingly god. Many of people waiting for their bus to arrive participated with great interest in or project. Some we told the truth about us being students others we told that we just relaxing for no special reason. The youth were extremely interested in our constructed homely, relaxing environment. We observed that the majority of the youngsters visiting us also participated in the sms-part of the project. Mostly all of them naturally picked up their mobile phones answering the question right away. In right here we registered in huge contrast between the youth and the elderly generation. Compared with the older generation, most young people carry their cell phones with them constantly and the phones are accessible near them in a pocket or so. The phone is a mobile interface from where the youth and people form a certain generation can interact with their surroundings. By reading us a message on how they relax it dosn´t seems that private and intimate if we have asked them to answer face to face. It is obviously easier for young people to write a massage than to say thing out loud, like the elderly generation, who prefer to interact and answer the question face to face. At the same time we felt it very inappropriate to ask them to write a massage with the answer instead of telling us on location.
Our expectations towards the projekt were generally fulfilled: we created a little cosy homely environment in the public space, which some took great trouble to overlook and ignore, whereas others found it most interesting and jolly fun.
A thing we hadn't thought of turned out to be one of the most interesting point concerning the project; namely the choices of our locations. We wanted them to be very public and preferably unignorable(?!), but we hadn't considered the interaction with the other groups in the steets. for example, there was a demostration about the poor wages of women in children's care institutions, and also news wendors and salvation army people, which we were constantly being mistaken of being a part of. Especially because we didn't have any clear advertising of what we were about. of this we can conclude that people ikn the city have become used to ignoring strange and otherwise things seemingly out of place. It is now our duty to (fight the power and ) make the public more aware of the beauty of their surroundings.
The whole mobile phone-reflection-documentation aspect worked in some ways, especially with younger people but we should chance something about that specific thing to integrate the elderly generation in our Mobile Home project.
theory
group-meeting-schedule
group-meeting
Feedback from Lone and Johanne
The idea is good and you have some good thoughts on how it relates to the readings from both classes. Your use of the mobile phone as the 'party starter' is a bit problematic – how often would you respond to a phone number on a generic sticker put up somewhere? It seems more likely that your project will live on interest and curiousness of the people passing by your mobile home and not the people who see your sticker exactly because you obviously alter a place (by marking it) in the middle of the street. Try to integrate the mobile technology aspect more in the home itself – maybe by showing movies on an iPod or other portable device. Or by allowing people to upload pictures and videos to an iPod or a similar device, that you provide? Or can people 'rent' a device while in your home (see eyeTEASers: http://www.terminus1525.ca/node/33542 (google it for more info))?
Also, a similar project on homes in public space has been carried out in New York (http://urbanhomesteadingproject.wordpress.com). Artists live for 24 hours in the public home made out of found furniture and invite people to join them. You aim to do something different, but see if this project can take you further. Also consider to bring in reflections on place and space as e.g. Flanagan (UA), Wilken (MI) and maybe also C. Bassett (MI) reflect on.
