How to use it: Use these media files as prompts/starting points for your own projects. My roommate once said that Washington Square Park was an ’unspoken meeting place amongst strangers. Go meet some strangers.

Artist Statement: The idea was to divide a subsegment of Washington Square Park into a grid. I chose a short walkway framed by 2 rows of 12 benches near the Eastern exit of the park. Each bench was a square of the grid, along with the bench-lengthed piece of pavement beside it. So 24 benches + the walkway between, in increments of 12 = 36 things. The top of the grid faced West and the bottom faced East. It was a mental grid - there were no real gridlines there, I just imagined the divides in my head.

I wrote about each first person, bird, or occurrence that happened in the grid square during a defined span of time, which was until the grid filled up, (though I mostly wrote about people). Things I took note of were what they looked like, what they wore, what I could read of their faces, who they were with or if they were alone, which way they walked and how they walked, and so on. I jotted down information about strangers in a lesser amount of time than it would take for me to even form a proper impression of them.

This isn’t about accurately depicting what I saw or heard at a specific time and place; this is about how I, along with the world’s population, project ideas onto people. The details I wrote about were often extremely specific and were always completely arbitrary. After I wrote them, I picked any file from my computer that I could associate with them to bookmark them, by embedding them into something else. Sometimes the associated “thing” was related to their surface details, and other times I pried deeper to think about how they might have felt, but ultimately, I was just trying to connect two dots.

Everything on this website was translated through the lens of my own life’s experiences, memories, knowledge, opinions, and feelings - and that is how stories used to be told and how they’ve changed over time. Also, most of the content was pulled from what was already saved on my computer, so that had its influences as well. Ultimately, this archive is equally about myself as it is about the people in it, because I saw things the way I wanted to. We all do, almost all the time.

People undoubtedly have more than just one "thing" to them, but I never stayed long enough to learn. In this new narrative, I am communicating the story of 36 people, and through the inspiration they served just by being there, they are communicating mine.