community

We set up a task for ourselves, a game really, to try and come to terms with what community exactly is. We went to six different consumer stores and walked around, with a tape recorder. One of the fascinating parts to this process was trying to rediscover our own sense of awareness to our surroundings. We had to force our brains to stop censoring all the auxiliary noise that we usually leave for our subconscious, and actually focus on it so that we could find those sounds and record them. Even through this process our brains really only found the sounds that were most blatant: babies crying, children screaming, people who have very loud indoor voice. But on occasion, we would happen across a personal conversation between two people or an interaction between a sales associate and a customer. The recorder also picked up a lot of sounds the store makes on its own, the beeping sound of the check out line, the ringing of a telephone gone unanswered, the announcements over the intercom. And in an attempt to discover what makes up community, we actually figured out what community feels like, what community actually is. As a non-tangible entity, community exists not because of the spaces, the architecture in which we inhabit; it exists as the people who live in these spaces. As a way to understand the place in which we live, we first need to understand the people with whom we share our space. The following pages are our interpretations of these people, who ultimately are community.