Overview
Millions of people ride the metro every day in very different cities all over the world. Even despite different cultures, different languages, different politics, etc, the experience from continent to continent, country to country, and city to city remains similar. Metros were invented to get people to and from work, and while people use metros for many different things, going to and from work is still the primary use of it. Everyone travels the same route ­ unlike buses, the route cannot change ­ often at the same time with the same other people. But they are alone in the crowd, and concentrate on their own thoughts. People ignore the sounds of the trains, the names of the stations going by, and conversations. Often people are tired and introspective, and the trains are sometimes crowded and claustrophobic.

We want to showcase the boundarylessness and internationalism of the metro. It¹s part of the industrialized world¹s universal experience. We want to call attention to sounds and experiences of things that people tend to ignore. Anything that has moving parts is making some amount of noise, and most passengers have put it out of their commuting experience, along with noticing other people.

Our installation recreates the experience of the being on the metro. We want to simulate riding the metro and exposing the various disregarded aspects of being on the metro­ the sound of the metro, and the people on the metro ­ in addition to highlighting things that people do experience.

This installation has not been previously exhibited.

Description
This piece consists of both visuals and sounds. A corridor will be created with two 2.5 meters tall by 10 meters long panels representing a metro car. The panels are the images of metro maps all over the world, mixed together. There will be eight projectors outside of the corridor (4 on each side) which will project images of people ­ silhouettes and sketches - of people approximately life size, riding the metro. The images will change periodically. The viewers who are walking between the outside walls of the installation and the projectors will give extra moving shadows which provides additional dynamics to the installation.

Inside the corridor people can look closely at the maps searching for familiar metro stations and recognizing cities transportation systems. On the floor there will be footprints of imaginary people. Since we aren¹t trying to make an exact replica of a metro car, but rather just make people have an abstract association with the experience, there will not be any seats or poles for people

Sounds

There are two different types of sounds that will be part of the installation.

In our mockup, we¹ve made field recordings of the BART system in San Francisco California, United States. Our final version will include sounds from metro stations from all over the world. The sounds in this recording are ambient sounds of the metro ­ e.g. doors opening and closing, the trains starting and stopping, system announcements, background conversations and the general sounds of the trains running.

The sounds will be in two virtual levels. There will be a row of speakers near the floor and another row of speakers about 2.5 metros high ­ near the top of our installation. The sounds near the floor will be field recordings of metro systems. The sounds near the ceiling will be thought sounds ­ short words and phrases representing thoughts- what people are thinking about as they commute. This will include many different people in many different languages, involving subjects from around the world. The sound will be played through 4 ­6 speakers on each level, placed throughout the installation.

From a technical standpoint, we will use an apple titanium laptop g4 with a digi 001 or 002 to play the 12 or so sound files randomly. An alternative would be to have 4-6 CD players playing random infinitely repeating tracks, each giving us two channels of semi randomly picked sound, so that the auditory texture of the piece will constantly be changing.