Final Project Proposal, Ghosts of the Vanquished

Statistically, 'New Brunswick' is a very diverse place. However, in reality the geography of this city is divisible into three physical districts: Rutgers University, the Downtown area, and Little Mexico. Furthermore, we can group these physical districts into two zones, whose boarders are defined by socio-economic status. In one zone we have those from middle/upper-middleclass backgrounds; these are the students and business men. In the other zone we have lower classes people; these are the Vanquished (i.e. minorities and immigrants). The individuals from ‘zone one’ are living in a gentrified areas and are afforded many opportunities and resources for self-advancement because of their status as citizens, students, and middle-class individuals; the vanquished have none of this. Having lived as a student in New Brunswick for four years now, I feel as though I can safely say that individuals from these zones rarely mix which I see a problem when one considers that, by definition, we still live in the same city. Making this worse is the fact that the individuals from Zone 1 avoid or distance themselves the individuals from Zone 2 as much as they can. Whether this is conscious or unconscious matter not. What’s important is that the vanquished, on top of their limited resources (i.e. income, education, legal citizenship, etc.), are being further distanced from the society that they have every right to be a part of. Since the students are the ones with the power to create this distance, I wanted to design a project that would undo the distance that they have put between themselves and the vanquished using sound. I would like to take the ambient sound from a location of the vanquished and subtly impose it in on a related location of the students (e.g. playing the sounds of a restaurant in Little Mexico at Au Bon Pain or the student center), corroding the unconscious avoidance that students exhibit for the vanquished. The sound played would be streamed live by setting up microphones at the vanquished site and speakers at the non-vanquished location. My project is based on two ideas: (1) people are unconsciously tuned into ambient noise and (2) exposure to something unfamiliar to you helps close the distance you put between yourself and it. Such a project does something which I have never come across in locative-media, subliminally raise awareness of a location and people from that location.