The Waiting Room
Waiting Room Description
This project will employ modified public intervention strategies learned through practices like “shop dropping,” in which convincing and subversive products are created using the tropes of commercial design and then dropped into unsuspecting businesses to be found by members of the public. Upon their discovery, there is a crucial moment of puzzlement and uncertainty on the part of the viewer. They are confronted with an object that is designed with all the expected conventions of marketing, but on closer examination seems to have a different goal. In that initial moment of discovery when they can no longer continue on autopilot, they become fully engaged. This project is similar to shop dropping, but instead of creating a convincing product and dropping it into an unsuspecting shop, this project will create a convincing façade of an entire organization, and drop that organization into an unsuspecting community.
The space I’m using is the Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland at 4231 Telegraph Avenue. I’ll begin by stripping away every trace of the gallery as an operating art space until there is a completely blank interior and a completely blank exterior with no remaining signs for the gallery. Starting from that blank slate I’ll be creating what appears to be a new legitimate business operating in that space. There is a lot of foot traffic in the area and the idea is to lure people off the street and into the space.
The specific project I am creating is called "The Waiting Room."
We tend to say there are “not enough hours in the day” until we find ourselves forced to wait. Suddenly we have too much time. We have time we do not want. We need a way to “occupy” our time or even “kill” it. If “time is money” then waiting is like currency devaluation. We scramble to get whatever we still can for our devalued time. We exchange it for things we don’t really want. The waiting room offers these things. We pick up old magazines. We study brochures. We walk to the water cooler and the aquarium. We watch whatever video is playing. We want to get whatever we still can for our devalued time. Above all we want to avoid an untempered experience of waiting. We want to “fill the time”. We want to get as far as possible from pure waiting.
Waiting is not a contemporary invention but it is interesting to note that the degree of contrast it holds to the rest of our lives is more extreme in the contemporary world. The experience of waiting is more exaggerated when placed in the context of a fast paced modern culture. Is it possible that waiting has never been more uncomfortable?
Does part of the discomfort come from the fact that while waiting we are naturally led to think about the concept of waiting itself, and the introspective questions that might come with it? Is our contextually heightened discomfort enough to put us right on the edge of a poorly timed existential crisis without quite getting there? Do the familiar ubiquitous furnishings of a waiting room evoke some vague uncanny feeling of impending unease, as we feel ourselves on the verge of thinking directly about abstractions like time and duration? Are we about to start having a bunch of deep thoughts about whether our entire lives are in fact just one long wait, moderated by successful distractions we use to “fill the time” that must be endured before we die? Seriously? Are we really on the cusp of all that right now when all we want to do is hurry up and see the dentist and get back home and get on Facebook and watch TV and maybe take a nap?
What if the distractions provided by a waiting room offered no escape? What if they were intentionally designed to simply redirect our attention back to the waiting room? What if it wasn’t even clear what we were supposed to be waiting for?
What would result if we were made to think more directly, not just about waiting, but about these environments created solely to plug the gaps between things? Maybe it really would validate that muddy foreboding sensation by actually inducing some sort of fatalistic existential crisis…but that seems unlikely. Maybe it would be more hopeful than that. Maybe it would make us more mindful of the spaces around us, at least for a little while. Maybe it would just leave us thinking without concluding.
Waiting Room will serve as a reminder of the space between things. Rather than providing typical distractions of a waiting room, the insistent reflexivity of the supporting materials will undermine all possibility of finding an escape or distraction from the immediate environment.
This will be a public art project with an unusual strategy for audience interaction. This project has no interest in cultivating passive viewers. It seeks active investigators, thinkers and questioners. With a subtle ambiguous humor it will aim to create something that is neither completely obtuse nor too quickly digested. The strategy is to achieve a fuller engagement with the public with a tactic of initially confounding expectations in order to create a moment of uncertainty and questioning.
Large signs in the window will ambiguously offer “Free Reality Simulations!” to grab the interest of passersby. When someone stops to see what’s going on inside, he or she will find what initially appears to be a typical waiting room. On closer inspection they will realize something is off.
A wide variety of polished promotional materials are essential to presenting the organization as a fully articulated and well-funded entity. Amongst other details the Waiting Room will include custom instructional pamphlets, a calendar, a video, framed photographs, signage, posters, a children’s area, and a receptionist to help introduce the experience and stoke the interest of curious passersby.
Any cursory exploration of the space will lead to a discovery of at least one of the ambiguous supporting materials that do not quite fit expectations and that in turn will lead to further investigation and reflection. This will be a waiting room with no escape routes.
http://royalnonesuchgallery.co
This project will employ modified public intervention strategies learned through practices like “shop dropping,” in which convincing and subversive products are created using the tropes of commercial design and then dropped into unsuspecting businesses to be found by members of the public. Upon their discovery, there is a crucial moment of puzzlement and uncertainty on the part of the viewer. They are confronted with an object that is designed with all the expected conventions of marketing, but on closer examination seems to have a different goal. In that initial moment of discovery when they can no longer continue on autopilot, they become fully engaged. This project is similar to shop dropping, but instead of creating a convincing product and dropping it into an unsuspecting shop, this project will create a convincing façade of an entire organization, and drop that organization into an unsuspecting community.
The space I’m using is the Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland at 4231 Telegraph Avenue. I’ll begin by stripping away every trace of the gallery as an operating art space until there is a completely blank interior and a completely blank exterior with no remaining signs for the gallery. Starting from that blank slate I’ll be creating what appears to be a new legitimate business operating in that space. There is a lot of foot traffic in the area and the idea is to lure people off the street and into the space.
The specific project I am creating is called "The Waiting Room."
We tend to say there are “not enough hours in the day” until we find ourselves forced to wait. Suddenly we have too much time. We have time we do not want. We need a way to “occupy” our time or even “kill” it. If “time is money” then waiting is like currency devaluation. We scramble to get whatever we still can for our devalued time. We exchange it for things we don’t really want. The waiting room offers these things. We pick up old magazines. We study brochures. We walk to the water cooler and the aquarium. We watch whatever video is playing. We want to get whatever we still can for our devalued time. Above all we want to avoid an untempered experience of waiting. We want to “fill the time”. We want to get as far as possible from pure waiting.
Waiting is not a contemporary invention but it is interesting to note that the degree of contrast it holds to the rest of our lives is more extreme in the contemporary world. The experience of waiting is more exaggerated when placed in the context of a fast paced modern culture. Is it possible that waiting has never been more uncomfortable?
Does part of the discomfort come from the fact that while waiting we are naturally led to think about the concept of waiting itself, and the introspective questions that might come with it? Is our contextually heightened discomfort enough to put us right on the edge of a poorly timed existential crisis without quite getting there? Do the familiar ubiquitous furnishings of a waiting room evoke some vague uncanny feeling of impending unease, as we feel ourselves on the verge of thinking directly about abstractions like time and duration? Are we about to start having a bunch of deep thoughts about whether our entire lives are in fact just one long wait, moderated by successful distractions we use to “fill the time” that must be endured before we die? Seriously? Are we really on the cusp of all that right now when all we want to do is hurry up and see the dentist and get back home and get on Facebook and watch TV and maybe take a nap?
What if the distractions provided by a waiting room offered no escape? What if they were intentionally designed to simply redirect our attention back to the waiting room? What if it wasn’t even clear what we were supposed to be waiting for?
What would result if we were made to think more directly, not just about waiting, but about these environments created solely to plug the gaps between things? Maybe it really would validate that muddy foreboding sensation by actually inducing some sort of fatalistic existential crisis…but that seems unlikely. Maybe it would be more hopeful than that. Maybe it would make us more mindful of the spaces around us, at least for a little while. Maybe it would just leave us thinking without concluding.
Waiting Room will serve as a reminder of the space between things. Rather than providing typical distractions of a waiting room, the insistent reflexivity of the supporting materials will undermine all possibility of finding an escape or distraction from the immediate environment.
This will be a public art project with an unusual strategy for audience interaction. This project has no interest in cultivating passive viewers. It seeks active investigators, thinkers and questioners. With a subtle ambiguous humor it will aim to create something that is neither completely obtuse nor too quickly digested. The strategy is to achieve a fuller engagement with the public with a tactic of initially confounding expectations in order to create a moment of uncertainty and questioning.
Large signs in the window will ambiguously offer “Free Reality Simulations!” to grab the interest of passersby. When someone stops to see what’s going on inside, he or she will find what initially appears to be a typical waiting room. On closer inspection they will realize something is off.
A wide variety of polished promotional materials are essential to presenting the organization as a fully articulated and well-funded entity. Amongst other details the Waiting Room will include custom instructional pamphlets, a calendar, a video, framed photographs, signage, posters, a children’s area, and a receptionist to help introduce the experience and stoke the interest of curious passersby.
Any cursory exploration of the space will lead to a discovery of at least one of the ambiguous supporting materials that do not quite fit expectations and that in turn will lead to further investigation and reflection. This will be a waiting room with no escape routes.
http://royalnonesuchgallery.co
