Apartment

"Marek Walczak is an artist and architect who is interested in how people participate in physical and virtual spaces. Martin Wattenberg's work centers on the theme of making the invisible visible. Jonathan Feinberg is a musician and computer programmer. Jonathan 'JD' Feinberg, 'The Doctor of Sound,' was They Might Be Giants' first touring drummer.

In Apartment you are confronted with a blinking cursor. As you type the room responds, engaging you in conversation, building a home around you. This dwelling is built of spatial image/text fragments, forming an equivalence between the space you inhabit and the mental space of your conversation. Over time the dwelling acquires a history, being a palimpsest of conversations with those that engaged with it. The scratches in the space are made up of images and texts derived from the dwellers' inputs, web searches and translations, organized into clusters of spaces/ideas.

The 'apartments' created during the exhibition and on the Apartment website are clustered into cities according to their semantic relationships. The cities can be arranged according to semantic complexes such as ‘Art,’ ‘Body,’ ‘Work,’ ‘Truth’– the apartments with the highest occurrence of the respective theme will move to the center.

Apartment is inspired by the idea of the memory palace, a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-it era. In the second century BCE, the Roman orator Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then delivering that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configuration." -- From Turbulence