If these walls could talk.

I hadn’t really ever stopped to analyze my relationship with the walls of the world, but doing so did give me some insight into my unconscious behavior while walking through the city. Walking around this week, I began to notice that I always leave a fair bit of distance between myself and any wall I happen to be walking by. The width of a sidewalk is immediately reduced by this automatic buffer, amplifying the claustrophobia factor of a heavily-trafficked narrow sidewalk. I also began to notice just how many walls surround me in the city. The walls which make up the buildings in this city make up a a gigantic labyrinth which I just meander through as I go about my day. Shops and restaurants distract me while in route, but the overwhelming majority of my time is spent walking parallel to a wall of one form or another.

Earlier this week I noticed a ‘new’ form of advertising in the subway tunnels around the city. Some company or another has started placing advertising panels in the subway stations complete with a 30 second sound clip ready to be listened to by a curious commuter equipped with headphones (I believe Pepsi may have done it first in Canada). At first, I thought the campaign a bit silly, but I caught myself and realized the power behind such an idea. Granted execution in the form I’ve described is less than perfect, but this company figured out how to make the everyday regular old unnoticed walls around us talk. Right now they only play a part of a song, but what if they could do more than that? What if they could tell secrets, or be listening booths, or song-sharing stations? What if there was way for us to interact with the very real walls which surround us? I believe this transactional model yields the potential for a passer-by to look to the wall as more than just a barrier, and then to begin to inscribe some part of herself upon the wall in a non-damaging way.

This idea of a ‘non-damaging’ relationship is important to me as I believe that others have just as much a right to a relationship with a given wall as I do and vice versa. I was recently in the Czech Republic and was horrified to see what so-called graffiti artists had done to some of the historic cities around the country. I understand a certain desire to leave a mark, rebel, and create art, but I simply cannot understand juvenile attempts at such destroying walls and monuments that belong to a greater community. It would be great, if interactive walls provided a means of voting for which graffiti enhanced or detracted from a given space to then be able to identify which graffiti should be removed. In this way, I think certain spaces could be taken back from imitators who can’t do much more than poorly write some obscenity, and deeoer graffiti art which has a larger message in mind. The wall could then become the stage for a democratic process of determining what types of things should be imposed on the greater society which also shares the wall.