#5
My site for the project is the Union Station in New Haven.
The train station has a metaphorical meaning for me. When I was growing up，I was frequently moving and raised by different people at different times. While train stations appear to be nothing but temporary stops for most people, they represent the only permanent places in my childhood memory.
As ubiquitous symbols, the train stations also have profound and universal spatial metaphors. It is a space of portals, of arrivals and departures, of transition, of threshold, of opportunities, and to some extent, represents infinity of space.
The subtle duality of train station’s public nature and its evocation of personal emotion attachment also fascinates me. Numerous films romanticize train stations in associations with heartbreaking partings, lonely drifting, or glimmering hope for change in the unknown future. By attaching personal feelings and memories to the train stations, I claimed an extremely public space for my own.
I went to the Union Station twice. The underground tunnel connecting all platforms is stunning. It looks like an endless portal but divert into staircases leading to different platforms on both sides. I think the tunnel space, with the connecting staircases, has the potential of transforming into something that reflects infinity and threshold — of perceived space, time, and memories. The staircases could potentially be critical joint points for spatial collage of events and unfold themselves as POV walks along the main tunnel. The path doesn’t need to be linear as long as infinity and chance is expressed.
On my first trip, I recorded videos in the tunnel space with a DSLR camera. I recorded only the initial section in one side of the double-way tunnel. When my remote collaborator Yi Wang and I tried to produce the photogrammetry model, we realized that it only captured the left wall well. After discussion, we decided that a second attempt is needed with better camera setting in the dark environment and more documentation of both sides of tunnels and the space beyond the dividing wall.
In the first trip, I also recorded some sensor data in the car on my way to and back from the site. I wanted to document the experience of being on the road. Even though travel experience in car and in train are quite different, it provides a preliminary glimpse into the travel experience, specifically the feeling of body shaking in response to the vehicle movement, as concretized as data of acceleration and deceleration, gyroscope, speed, etc. I haven’t found good scripts to transform the data into spatial objects in Maya yet, but that would be the goal for the next week, and potentially the spatial visualization of data could influence the reconstructed space of the project.
Another form that could potentially influence the reconstructed space is human gesture. In our conversation, Yi brought up that works by Lucy McRae(1) and Gonzalo Borondo(2) in which human body and gesture influence meanings of space around them. She suggests that we could document gestures of people at the train station and use them in the space reconstruction. I agreed and suggested we could reenact the gestures at a later time and capture body forms in different scales to carve into existing space as bodily imprints . I took videos of people’s gestures and behaviors as they wait for the train on the platform and in the lobby or walk or run through tunnels for analysis later.
On the second trip, I borrowed two 360 cameras to take 360 photos and videos, hoping that they would be useful for photogrammetry. I walked through both sides and behind the first part of the tunnel (as shown in the diagram), in order to get a fuller view for the interior documentation. But the 360 photos and videos didn’t transform well in ReCap or CaptureReality, so I returned to the videos. I captured both the tunnel and the stairs spaces, and the stairs worked out much better and clearer than the tunnels. It might be because the tunnel space is too homogenous and repetitive, making it difficult for reality capturing softwares to identify the components in different locations. For the next attempt, I would bring colorful and highly distinguishable objects and place them alongside the tunnel to help marking location for easier identification.
For the past week I have been pondering the meaning for this project and for the notion of mechanical eye. It became clearer in a conversation with Yi — we are combining what’s beyond human eye and what’s beyond mechanical eye, the former being the capture and visualization of objective data and the latter being the ineffable experience and feeling with human sensibilities. By combining them we extend the vision of both eyes and see things unseen before. For this train station project specifically, the mechanical eye steps further into the soft, illogical, and abstract human emotions and calls out subjective experience by concretizing them into visible data.
Reference:
1. McRae, Lucy. “Compression Cradle.” https://www.lucymcrae.net/compression-cradle.
2. Borondo Gonzalo, “NON PLUS ULTRA.” https://gonzaloborondo.com/work/non-plus-ultra/.
3. Vertesi, Janet. “Introduction.” Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
