Young Architects Program International

White Noise (or The Buzz) reveals the latent potential of the community. It is the sound of the talent and value around us. The installation harnesses this latent value with an interactive sound environment embedded in a playful series of figural abstractions, clad with white synthetic turf. The foregrounded backdrop of the architecture highlights the project’s main event, sharing and exchange among the people in the space, and manipulates readings of scale.

The sounds are sourced via phone from visitors and passersby, who are asked to share what skills and resources they have to exchange. The tactile turf invites visitors to participate through touch, unleashing the altered sound input via sensors to control clarity and volume. The visual and kinesthetic experience of the project’s white set pieces blurs both depth and scale. Visitors feel as though they inhabit the space of a 2-D drawing or paper model, playing object and subject simultaneously.

The project explores two approaches to sustainability: community-based and material-based. The community approach aims to both expose local peer resources through interaction and translate the labor involved in building into ongoing bartered exchanges. Interactions are encouraged to continue outside the walls in the creative bartering community of OurGoods.org. The material approach converts the monetary investment into afterlife possibilities; not only are sustainable materials used, they are either fed back into the community as playground covering and materials for local artists or returned to their original use.

Text submitted by FRENCH 2D