A design proposal for Downtown Cranford Utility Box.
Topologies are map-like drawings, where through listening, I create new landscapes of my perception of sound’s properties like materiality, size, texture, direction. I map sounds in places like my backyard in Cranford, NJ, urban areas, the beach, parks ann other. The drawing I am proposing is made up of lines of sounds of my backyard: birds, cars, machines, people talking, airplanes; the lines have trajectories, location, point in time, they are triggers, places of arrival and departure – paths that are very similar to our way of life today.
The location of the box, an intersection in a downtown with multi-cultural restaurants and shops, is very close to where my work is coming from: a world where everything is relational, a complex evolving system: where bodies emerge and move in multiple directions, always in relation, creating pathways, networks, making one continuous event.
The sound drawings create a new way of listening, transforming the sound to a line, and from a line to a direction and to an event. The Utility Box can be called a Listening station, where the person passing by can stop and listen. This will be a great opportunity to not only show art but create an ongoing participatory event to encourage an acute perception of our environment. While this drawing is a drawing of my backyard, we can create a site specific drawing that is specific to the sounds around the utility box.