(?) SIDE THE BOX          

Team members: Li Shi, Kai Wu, Chloe Hou, Junyan Hu & Yunming Zhang

Yale School of Architecture North Gallery | Andrew Benner | Fall 2022

In our modern society, people are becoming more private and segregated, especially after the advent of COVID. We used to be only residents inside our skins and now we are residents inside our own little boxes. Meanwhile, a chunk of our lives is shipped to us also in the form of boxes by Amazon, USPS, etc. Thanks to industrial convenience, the mountain comes to the modern Mohammed.

Our lives essentially consist of putting what used to be in one box into another, physically and digitally. These boxes offer us an opportunity to be not only somewhere else but also in some other temporality. They transport us externally while we translate them internally. But the actual journey is all but convenient. It often starts from a factory in a distant corner of the world, where the box’s interior is enriched by the presence of goods and commodities, its exterior decorated with barcodes signifying information about its origin and destination.

Once it reaches us, we retrieve the contents inside, assimilating them into our bodies and lives and so long to the box itself. But the journey never ends with the box being folded into two dimensions. A box is, far from being a dead-end, an entrance to another world, an attribute we often ascribe to the eyes. In this exhibition, we hope to prolong the moment of opening the boxes where one observes and examines them before tearing them open. And it is only with the dedicated gaze, like that of Borges gazing into El Aleph, that one can arrive at the ineffable core that is their own boxes they wear everywhere.

Illustration showcasing the inceptive experience of the exhibition

It is with such observation that we picked up the boxes as the theme and central object of this exhibition. The moment one is inside the outermost box that is the gallery now sealed and taped, one is covered with a projection of barcodes that label them as well as the floor. The box’s journey is now translated as the journey of the visitors, who are themselves both outside and inside the boxes.

From the room hangs a large box that invites them to look inside and only from specific angles can they discover an almost intimate perspective: either the back of their heads or a bird eye view of the whole space. The journey then begins in a higher dimension for the visitor and the box, both of which fold only to expand again, their interior translated into exterior and vice versa, leaving traces on the surface. And through the opaque surface, we might be able to discover something translucent within ourselves, as shown in the innermost box where one is simultaneously everywhere, seeing all colors and hearing all sounds, bound inside a box and counting oneself the king of infinite universes outside.

Plan Perspective (above) and section (below) illustrating the exhibition layout and the user’s interactive experience inside the exhibition.

Axonometric diagram illustrating the exhibition inside the 2nd YSOA North Gallery

Exhibition opening Pictures

Axonometric drawings illustration the tectonics and assembly of the box

Illustrations representing how the connection of VR headsets to cameras to provide the user with a change of perspective

The First Layer: The entrance appears to be a large box. It is the opening side of the box. Visitors will feel like they are entering a huge box, making them aware that they are also objects inside it. In this way, they are de-centralizing themselves and engaging in the exhibition.

The Second Layer: Visitors will discover some small boxes after entering the large box. They can explore what was going on in the small physical box (there will be box stories inside these boxes for them to explore). Moreover, there will be projections on the ceiling that offers an opportunity to look at the infinite lists of objects (emblems, barcodes, moving material, etc. )that can be fitted into either physical or imaginary boxes. Projections from the top, flood the floor and paint the viewer’s bodies with barcodes and symbols of boxes, thus making the viewers aware that their skin constitutes their individual boxes.

The Third Layer: There will be a central box in the middle of the exhibition, where visitors can put their eyes near the surface of the box, where we will use VR to create the effect of real-time images of the outside space (which is what is going on in the space of the second layer). This way, people think they are looking inside, but they are actually looking at their surrounding spaces. In this way, visitors will be examined but also examine the space around them.

The Fourth Layer: In the middle of the central box is where people can put their heads. Here people can experience sensory deprivation of images, sounds, and environment.

Exhibition opening Pictures

Copyright © YDS | youssef denial 2023