2007 2009

Davis Square Tile Project / Community in Question

Beginning in 1977, the MBTA and the Cambridge Arts Council began collaborating on a project intended to invigorate a much lived space, the Boston subway system (or the T as it is known to locals). The project, named Arts on the Line, began at the same time as serious planning for the Red Line extension into Cambridge and Somerville (Porter, Davis, and Alewife stations were created, and many of the older stations were retrofitted to accommodate longer six car trains), and commissioned artists to create installations in and surrounding the subway stations. Every station that was redone from the late seventies through the 1980s had shiny new art installations, many by local artists. The project took one percent of funding for T improvements to spend on art, which seems like a very small amount, but for a system that is perpetually in debt, like the MBTA, the program was slashed.

Now, roughly twenty-five years after the Red Line extension, serious discussion surrounding another T extension is commencing. The Green Line, which currently ends at Lechmere in Cambridge, is proposed to extend into Union Square and Ball Square in Somerville as well as College Ave near Tufts University, ending all the way out at Rt. 16. The project is a requirement due to the Conservation Law Foundation law suit against the state for the infamous Big Dig, as a way to mitigate the air pollution with disproportionately affects Somerville residents.

In early April, descended on Somerville (and Medford) to investigate and facilitate a conversation on the potential benefits and problems of the Green Line extension. Just how would if affect the area it was planned to enter? And could we look to the Red Line extension of the 1980s as a prediction of what would occur? We created a reader and lead a walking tour for a conference at Tufts, and began thinking about another branch of the project.

Looking at the Arts on the Line project, members of the Action Mill and the Think Tank joined up to work on the Davis Square Tile Project, a Distributed and Participatory Public Investigation (DPPI). In the Davis Square T Stop, 249 tiles were created by a local artist and students at the Powderhouse Community School. These tiles were installed in the station. Now, decades later, we are attempting to contact the makers of these tiles in order to ask just how Somerville has changed for them in the years between. Might these 249 voices act as a sampling of families in Davis Square at the time, and perhaps indicate what is to come in neighborhoods like Ball Square?

airports.

I used to get great work done at the airport. Amazing work. Such good work that when I could swing it, I would get to the airport even an extra hour early, like sometimes after getting through security giving myself three hours to sit and write, read, think. No longer.

I moved to Boston two years ago, started coming to visit Boston almost a year before that. It was the silence of airtravel between Boston and Chicago that helped me write my thesis. I took night flights into Boston, sweeping in to meet my advisor. I took day flights over the mountains when I looked at apartments. I read long, theoretically complicated books on these planes. I wrote term papers.

The airport is a nonplace, a liminal space, a space that is neither here nor there. And an airplane is even worse. There are no electrical outlets, no internet, no telephone. All you bring on your carry on is all you have, that and the SkyMall.

Though I can't recall when the shift came, the airport in Boston now plays radio. Boston Logan International Airport has its own radio station. It sounds like radio in the movie theater. Chicago O'Hare plays CNN. No longer do I have the silence split only by a stranger's conversation.

Yesterday I read a quote from Bob Dylan about young people listening to earbuds when walking around, young people always behind their iPhone. He said we were not living like that. We are disconnected from the real world (I don't put real world in scare quotes because I don't think Dylan would have, I think he must genuinely think there is a real, able to be felt and understood real world). This morning on the subway to work, I looked across from where I was standing to see a grey haired middle aged man with bright orange sticking out of his ears. Earplugs. How funny not to hear the roar of the subway tunnels. Across from him sat a young woman, she also had bright orange coming out of her ears. They looked at each other and smiled while everyone else on the train avoided gazes, read the ads, or read their books. Today in the airport, I pulled my earplugs out of my messenger bag to drown out the Coldplay and conversation. I molded the earplugs so as not to hear you. And so, I wonder, does the beaming radio make our insularity worse?