Mura
from Cities and Memories, Act II
Date
2023/7 - 2023/11
Media
[The thick wall installation] wood board, gesso, watercolor, ILFORD smooth pearl photo paper, AI-generated voice (12), silicon molds (12), double-sided tape, foam board, plastic board, wood glue, copper wire
[The Wall-Reading Guidebook] heavy-weight coated paper (matte finish, #36)
Dimension
[The thick wall installation] 7” x 7” x 5.5”
[The Wall-Reading Guidebook] folded: 3.2’’ x 2.67’’ x 1.25’’ | expanded: 3.2’’ x 34.67’’ x 0.01”
Category
Personal Project, Speculative Design, Installation, Electronic Art, Print Making, Creative Writing, Graphic Design, Visual Narrative, Autobiography
"Mura is a project that blends real-life exploration with fictional imagination. It tells the story of city walls—an exploration into how people embed their identities and memories into living structures and how those urban architectures absorb human memories.
The two objects, Thick Wall Installation (a sample collection of walls in San Diego) and The Wall-Reading Guidebook (a fictional book from Mura) influence each other, creating a middle ground where modern urban habitats strive to reconnect with the city machine/organism they live in as well as building their shared, psychological living spaces.
We all say that people cannot see through walls. But have you ever tried seeing, listening, or touching them?
We all say walls have ears. But do you believe they remember what they hear?
— an unknown draughty corridor
Each house will have a memory; the characteristics and personalities of different human individuals can be written in the thickness of the walls…
— A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, 197. Thick Walls
Documentation
The hole positions of the twelve wall samples mimic the rise and fall of the sun.
The information is revealed through the folding layers via rotation and expansion.
The layers of the wall sample can be removed and rearranged.
The Thick Wall Installation and The Wall-Reading Guidebook share a pattern of stack and repeated layers.
The coordinates and surrounding landscape of the wall sample are recorded on the back.
The holes for the wall samples created a tunnel through the “thick wall.”
Unlike the solid, real walls, the silicon samples have an elastic, skin-like touch.
The elastic silicon samples provide a direct, tactile experience of the recorded walls.
The keywords for each wall environment are in the form of AI-generated audio.
The Wall-Reading Guidebook is designed to be portable and pocket-sized.
The book is an illusion of a 35” long piece of paper repeatedly folded.
Background
A Childhood Story
For over a decade, my family had owned the same refrigerator with an audio memo function on its door handle - an innovative feature. Instead of recording shopping lists, my parents recorded me singing songs learned from kindergarten.
The deleted button was never touched again once the four memory slots were used. From kindergarten to high school, occasionally, the family would gather around the fridge and listen to those songs - over and over again, even decades later.
The fridge was always there, partly embedded in the wall until I left home for college, while the family moved to a more spacious place.
The soundtracks were recorded on the phone. However, the fridge was gone—along with the apartment and the family members.
All that remains are vague memories and the ghostly sound inside my head, replayed endlessly.
Sometimes I thought it wasn't me singing those songs, but the fridge. The thick walls were talking to us, reminding everyone what life we used to live.
In a deserted field, someone might come across a singing fridge—an object preserving the lost memories of an unknown family, along with the innocence of days gone by.
A Collective Pattern
From cave paintings to the doodles by children around the home, to urban graffiti, it seems that deeply rooted in human nature is the urge to leave marks on walls—a memory storage device we have utilized since the very beginning.
In the book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, this idea is discussed in 197: Thick Walls—the family lifestyles, identities, and memories are solidified into objects and then stored in the thick wall through various forms. Thus, a home can be seen as a living organism or operating machine constantly engaging in information exchange with its inhabitants.
In this way, a wall becomes a peephole into someone’s life.
In comparison, the current “wall” we know is closer to a screen—smooth, homogeneous, and static. Part of the explanation could be the change in urban lifestyle—from big, multi-generational households to atomic/single families. People equip their homes with more digital components and gradually transform them into virtual spaces. The concern mentioned in 79: Your Own Home has become more relevant than ever, considering the barrenness of rental home spaces due to restrictions on modification and limited inhabiting time. In this sterile environment, hardly anything can bloom on the walls.
The walls are underdeveloped—they are mere space dividers, huge but invisible to men.
Concept
Cities, alive
There is much evidence that a city is a living organism—traffic flows, trash cans, and rhythms. The city grows, metabolizes, and eventually decreases someday. Perhaps by studying its skin samples from different organs, i.e., wall fragments from different locations, we can have a glance at its history and a possible future.
Multisensory story-telling
Despite the abstract format, the creation and presentation of the Mura installations target multiple human senses, reconstructing a multisensory city experience.
Built upon the pattern of walls/layers/pages, the installation of the wall samples creates a thick wall/book with visual, haptic, and auditory information. It serves as a portal to reconnect people to the hidden channels of reality.
The two sides of a wall
No matter which side is outside, there are two sides of the wall we are certain of: the side we can see and the side we cannot. If we look from the wall’s point of view, there are two phases—those currently standing in front of it and those who used to be in the same place.
Therefore, a wall is not only a physical barrier but also a temporal medium. Through city walls, people gaze back in time.
There could be a fictional city where walls are made of highly impressionable materials, slowly shaped by the environment. Thus, the unique art of wall-reading thrives.
Or maybe we have already lived in those cities; only the language of walls is lost.
Process
The thick wall installation
For about a month, I drove around San Diego, collecting wall texture samples using baking clay, which were then cured in the oven. I also recorded photos of the environment, location coordinates, and related keywords.
The Ꮃall-Reading Guidebook
Drawing inspiration from my experience of collecting wall samples around San Diego, I created a 'wall-reading guidebook' for the fictional city Mura, covering a total of 12 types of walls.
Next, I manually shaped 12 clay molds based on the descriptions from the guidebook. The clay pieces were cured and pressed onto a black ink pad.
Foam boards were cut into twelve 7” x 7” squares with a hole cut out in the middle to fit each wall sample.
Silicon molds were placed in the holes of the boards, which were drilled with small holes to stack on a wood and copper wire structure.
Silicon wall samples were cast using these clay molds.
Plastic boards, photos, and keywords were then glued to the foam boards. (The keywords were later removed and replaced by the AI-generated voice.)
The direct patterns from the inked clay pieces and their print marks on paper were captured by a camera and vectorized in Illustrator.
The unconventional-ratio book layout was completed using Illustrator with an old-style font, Bembo. The book was then printed and folded in a zig-zag style. (The print shop could only produce single-sided prints for the scale I requested, so I ended up taping two single-sided prints together.)