You Were Here: A Soap Opera
Columbus OH
winning competition entry: installed for the holiday season 2003

We collect postcards of our city. We have some of the old and hard to find, but a favorite is probably the one at right: High Street circa 1950s, alive in neon, color, and nightlife. Most of what we see here is gone today, stripped away by attrition, demolition, and a shifting elsewhere of the things that make downtowns come alive: bars, restaurants, clubs, galleries, shops, streetfront offices.Sponsored by the arts community and civic leadership, “Windowfills” was a competition open to artists and designers looking for solutions to “decorate” vacant storefronts in the transitional downtown over the holiday season. “You Were Here: A Soap Opera” was our winning submission and was designed and installed in an eight week period in Autumn 2003 and opened to the public for a six week run beginning November 23, 2003. Our largest “site” to date (and therefore in many ways our largest built work), the installation transformed a three block area of the downtown for a budget of just $10,000.

We conceived of the project as both a “rebuilding” of this postcard and a way to make civic commentary on misguided, sprawl-supportive development efforts in the metro area. A series of eight vacant and derelict storefronts were selected and rear projection video systems installed within each. The storefront glass was “soaped” to make a semi-transparent pearlescent screen, onto which neon-filtered slow motion video was projected. Each location had its own custom sized video of full scale activity that “was there” at some point in time, but the content was imported from active “suburban” and “new urbanism” locations throughout the city. As day turned into night, the street transformed into a theater of neon color and light, if only temporarily.

realized: vacant three story anchor,
site one, downtown mall