week 1: observation
we chose the bathroom as the space for the observation project. we agreed on some concepts as relations between public/private space, some behaviours that changed when people is seen by others inside a public bathroom or what things people made on their private one. how strange was to have separate bathrooms for men and women, how they were built in regards to this... what made the bathroom such a peculiar space, since it's conceived as the place in behalf of ego. here some excerpts:
CHE: You know whats really funny is that there are two guys and two girls. So which bathroom are we going to doc!!! Ha ha!! Hmm. I don't mind going to the girls room. Mike you cool with that?? The entire concept of Separate bathrooms is weird in itself. It is one space at itp that the other sex does not know. The layout, textures, smells etc etc. It would be cool to capture the sensory triggers of the others bathrooms and switch them .
MIKE: As far as which bathroom, I'm fine with either. I am sort of ambivalent about separate bathrooms, but I guess if it was a unisex bathroom with multiple stalls plus a urinal or two, some people might have issues with that.
XIAOCHANG: You know, this talk of the gender-segregated bathrooms has got me thinking about how public bathrooms, despite being explicitly public in their name, are often thought of as semi-private spaces, thus the need for gender segregation - to aid the (false) sense of a homogenous "private" space. It also leads to another consideration somewhat unique to our space: the fact that, unlike a large public space, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to observe people (unless we set up hidden equipment) in the space without influencing how they behave with our presence. I think this is part of what makes our space interesting (where else is your awareness of the presence of strangers so high, but your desire to interact with them usually so low?), this sort of collapse of the delineations between public and private. This sort of fucks with that subject/object dichotomy, especially in terms of power structures (for some reason, I always think of horror movie instances where people hide out in bathroom stalls, which always make the whole concept of hiding more frightening by cutting the victim off from any means of observing the outside, while the killer always seems to know where the victim is anyway, putting the victim in a powerless state as pure "object"). And I think whatever we decide to actually do in this space, triggering people's awareness to the public (and thus observable) nature of the space will likely occur as a side affect to some degree, so maybe this is something to consider as we go along. I don't know, just something I was thinking about in relation to our space.
CAROLINA: for me the bathroom, is deinitely, the most important space inside a house. i spend a lot of time there (maybe more before i was this busy...) i like to read, while i smoke, talk by ph., while i take a bath and other things...i like decorated bathrooms, big bathrooms, perfumed bathrooms, toilettes (beautiful objects), bath tubs, every beauty product,water pipes, water, everything that comes in our bodies, gets out IN the bathroom, so much solids and liquids, like if the bathroom could be a disposable big solid bag to put thing on for then throw away................soap, cream, shaving, trying to be the cleanest, decent we can. i think bathrooms are very polite, so modern, cause they definitely goes against our own nature, which is to be smelly, untidy, ugly animals! artificiall pretencious cameras. a special chamber for us to feel and look better, so greek! a camera should register our face every morning, for us to face pict 1, when we were 11, with pict 2,900, when we are 67............digitally talking...............visual data? i think an interesting point is to observe people's attitude when getting inside this ideal place, faced with theirs getting out........
week 2 - prototype proposal
the concept
There are a number of issues conjured by the concept of the public bathroom, from environmental waste to gender segregation to basic vanity, but the most consistently present is the tension of public and private. In the effort to create a public private space through the use of visual compartmentalization, the public bathroom has in fact heightened the awareness of its public nature. The bathroom stall, in particular, remains decidedly conspicuous, unseen but all the more observable its lack of visibility.
While many installations in public bathrooms play on this tension of public and private/the viewing subject and the observed object, most do so through emphasizing the public and observable nature of the space by means of things such as semi-transparent glass stalls, two-way mirrors, and the like. We thought it would be more interesting therefore to alleviate the social anxiety of being observed instead of exacerbating it. To this end, we decided transform the aural landscape of the space.
In our observation of the restrooms at ITP, we noticed that the central means of observation was sound. Due to the fragmented and compartmentalized nature of the visual space (the stalls conspicuously hidden from view), sound becomes the primary sensory experience. While arguably, scent is also a dominant sensory experience in bathrooms, modern public bathrooms are so heavily ventilated that distinct, unadulterated scents are rare. What's more, in our time observing the ITP bathrooms in particular, we found sound to be more prominent, and more consistently *present* than scent. Everyone one enters the bathroom creates sounds, whether they are actually "using the bathroom" or not, while not everyone necessarily creates scents. In addition, the materials and space present in the bathroom creates distinct acoustics and often causes echoes and other magnifications of sound. Thus, we concluded that the social anxiety experienced in the bathroom is an aural one. Which is to say, the fear of being observed is primarily the fear of being heard.
We decided then to create sound “filters” in the key divisions of the bathroom – the stalls – which would take the organic human (and other incidental) sounds created by the ritual actions involved in using the bathroom and distort them in such a way as to make them unrecognizable through the use of reverbs, loops, echoing, and other distortions. These sounds then become “unobservable” in the sense that they become defamiliarized and divorced from their origins. We alleviate social anxiety not by suppressing sound, but by transforming it, thus turning using the bathroom, one of the most basic human rituals, loses the social shame associated with it by becoming, in a sense, a mediated experience.
We also want the filters to run both ways, sending distorted sounds from the stall into the surrounding area and visa versa, and thus creating a sort of unintentional discourse between those on either side. We rarely engage in willing human interactions with strangers in public restrooms in order to preserve to some extent the illusion of privacy, or at least of isolation, out of a sense of social shame. In turning an isolating space into a dialogic one, the sound filters at once reinforce and collapse the demarcation between stall and the more public part of the space, easing the tension between public and private without seeking to reconcile the two.
In order to create these sound filters, we decided to turn typical bathroom actions -- flushing the toilet, hand washing, getting paper towels, etc. into musical instrumentation. Each action would produce a atypical sound for the space which would be picked up by surface mounted pad mikes in order to localize the sound, which would then be fed through loops and reverbs in order to further alienate them from the action producing them and projected to the opposite side of the stall divide through plasma-ion speaker-film. Additionally, we thought to take advantage of the sound system to insert some PSAs? related to enviromental waste while there was a "captive" audience.
A Diagram of one proposed musical instrument:
