12.2012
Calabasas, a suburban neighborhood near City of Los Angeles, has unusual characteristic. Largely because of the fact that it is a relatively new, wealthy town, the landscape of Calabasas seemed more like a theme park, rather than a suburb. We decided inspect into the neighborhood more deeply, through our design processes and researches.
We noticed the fact that, as a project group consist of three Asians and one Caucasian, it was difficult to blend into the city. While we were visiting one of the resident areas -- those in Calabasas are mostly gated communities --, we were gently asked to leave as soon as possible by a couple of the residents.
At this point, we started to think about the exclusiveness and affirmative sense of local communities, which is probably different from those of people in other common neighborhood.
Mini Calabasas
Mini Calabasas is a series of printed publications, contains processed common dialog collected in Calabasas. The basic idea was, by suggesting average, common conversations of the city, to re-created a mini-Calabasas.
The dialogs printed on massive papers are collected throughout some of everyday places such as a community center, gas stands, restaurants, markets, banks, and movie theaters. Then we transcripted the collected dialogs, and processed through a text analysis program to narrow down data of most commonly used vocabularies. These data are printed on papers in different compositions depending on places they were from, to give more attached experience to the places themselves. By participants reading out the texts situated in specifically designed exhibition space, the audience can experience a acoustically re-created Calabasas.
