For one week only, with the greatest thanks to Tristan Appleby at Waterloo Station, I was able to observe for 17 hours on different days the way in which people read a book installation. 

 

I set this project out with 'The public book' in mind. The main intersections I wanted to explore were those between tradition and innovation, so I set out to incorporate my research in communication within this field.  

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My research broadened into how do we communicate, where and why. Within 'communication' I focused my interest in the receiver more than the producer of a message: we bring a world of meaning to our own reading experiences, in the same way that our mood-swings and senses certainly alter the way we receive the same messages. So I started being interested in our senses and how we generally think that we only have 5, but we have approximately (as scientists need yet to agree upon) 21 at least. So the main idea behind the stories I've written is a speculation of what would happen if some of our senses changed, what would we learn and how would we live and communicate.

 

The choice of place was deeply routed in challenging the very nature of the human senses and communication, because Waterloo station is a very busy environment full of message displays. The installation looks like a notice board in its structure, thought-out to be practical and blend in with the fact that public places have these to direct/inform people around.( This was proven, as there were instances during my observations when people with maps in their hands browsed the installation thinking there was going to be helpful information to their situation in it.)

 

The installation, within the station, was placed at a meeting point - right outside of Foyles. I wanted to see if people were available to think about another story in-between their own story and the one to come: the one that arrives with the person they are meeting with.  

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My observations showed that the execution of the installation blended-in too well, as people did initially think of using it as a constituent part of the station: scanning to get information (stopping interaction as soon as realizing that it wasn't informative), leaning, glancing, staring with a blank eye whilst on the phone with someone, meeting, standing in front of, using the lights to support their own reading, were frequent actions.

 

However, a few people actually read the book. They were strollers, loners, they weren't meeting anyone, they just had the time to give. Two other readers, enjoyed the reading of the book whilst they were having lunch. The great majority of people who looked at it for longer than 10sec were men, and they did so even during rush hour, whereas women hardly noticed its presence during rush hour. Men also seemed more inquisitive and methodical when approaching it, looking at it in its totality and more thoroughly, whereas women would look at it in more random ways/directions. I don't think that anyone got to the stage of cracking the codes, eventhough two men looked intensely onto the coded tiles but they didn't read the stories. Some people were drawn to it by the painting and were then motivated enough to read a couple of stories.

 

I had the printed/hand version of the book at Foyles for the duration of the install and sold two copies. 

 

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