The Song of Nature
Peiran Hu
When I was walking along the Sauchiehall Street, I noticed a very interesting phenomenon: the bins along the street had many small stickers on their casings. They are numerous and very unevenly distributed according to the different locations of the bins and the different orientations of the bins. The bin, as one of the lowest status yet most ubiquitous public amenities, is not usually the first to be morally critiqued due to its own attributes. This perhaps also leads to the fact that people are not morally bound to their behaviour in front of the bin, but are more self-interacted with it. Therefore, I decided to measure the value of trashcans to a vape smoker.
A music player for the stickers of vapes
It cannot only show the amount of stickers on each side of different trashcans, but also it tells the story of the surrounding and the activity trajectories of the vapers.
In rituals, symbols play an extremely important role in that they bridge the gap between a person’s perceptual awareness and emotional experience. Symbols give symbolic meaning to rituals and are intrinsically linked to human associations, thus creating a cognitive emotional resonance to the symbols.
Different from the sense of ritual in daily life, ritual is a structural form with independent order and rules, capable of extracting people from the daily split time state of modernity into the activity scene of ritual. In the process of this activity, the interaction of emotional experience between individuals and groups is transmitted and continued, which is the source of the sense of ritual from the perspective of time, and also a way to obtain an overall sense of time. Therefore, ritual is not only a cultural phenomenon, but also a social behaviour with profound significance.
Looking back at these stickers, I realise that they are in fact still SYMBOLS that can be used to identify a particular COMMUNITY. And it seems that through the TOOL I have made I created some sort of symbolism.
“Devotionalise”: Pattern and Audio
There are many accounts of the origins of musical instruments, but most of them are related to rituals, myths, domination and worship.
This prototype takes “drum” as the archetype. I created a frame structure with cardboard and created a cavity by sewing, a common form of attachment for drums, the cardboard together. I then hung a series of metal rings with thread and used the properties of clingfilm to create a lightweight transparent film surface inside the rings to create a wind driven “drumstick”. When wind blows, the ring in the centre will hit the hollow cardboard, creating a series of drumming sounds.
Out of my understanding of devotional space, when choosing the design site, I wanted the interior space to be as free as possible from the outside world in terms of visual and acoustic interferences. I chose a street corner away from Sauchiehall Street in order to control people’s access to information in the space. It is connected to an alleyway and the space is more introverted.
The Ritual
A metal wedge-shaped entrance amplifies the sound of the street. Each step is accompanied by a metallic crunch as one walks towards the entrance.
As the door closes, the sounds of the outside world come to a screeching halt, and in this narrow, muffled walkway, hearing slowly adapts and begins to search for sounds ahead.
A heavy door that separates the inside from the outside.
The absence of artificial lighting in the room leads one to look upwards and listen attentively.
Wind
Air convection is created with a circular openwork ceiling, while the top of the entrance way is interconnected with the outdoors, thus bringing wind into the room. The wind drives the encircling wind chimes around the centre, creating a series of sounds.
Rain
Rainwater enters the room along umbrella-shaped metal pipes, from the ticking sound of rain hitting overhead, to the rushing sound of water flowing through the pipes, which are then diverted underground to form a ring of water on the indoor floor.
