Nightingale floor: Development of concept

Today we looked more into our concept and decided that we needed something deeper to inform our work and let it grow. So we had a look at "presence" as a point or speck in the vast space of time.

Since the look we're going for in terms of how the floor section looks is going to have a DIY, messy look as mentioned in the previous entry, it is no excuse to be any less deliberate than doing something clean and sharp. We needed a source of inspiration to guide us in the design.

With the idea of "presence" in its relationship with time, we turned to retro. The word "retro" means to go backwards. Retro as in the style is all about nostalgia, reminiscent of a past era, specifically after WWII; going back in time through the retro style. For New Zealand in particular retro was particularly strong in the 70s and 80s. So we're going for the retro aesthetics here since its qualities of looking back to the past relates to our nightingale floor.

The nightingale floor answers the question "Did this person exist in this set time and space or not?" It is a device that acknowledges presence in an instant. So here, this retro platform recognises the walker's presence and with each accumulation of seconds gone by while they are still on the platform older, scratchy sounds plays to induce the feeling of an older era (nostalgia) and records the environment around the floor in that particular period of time, while movement (movement = moving forward = forward in time creating the present) would give newer sounds and playback the recording of the environment of that moment gone by as a reflection, a glance back in to a fresh moment fallen into the past.

Presence here in relation to time is the existence of a particular state of an object, in this case a human. Thus, in this sense the present is but a fleeting moment. An almost invisible point between the vast past states and infinite future states. This "moment" is something that we're trying to highlight, thought it will never truly be caught as it is devoured by time as quickly as another is born.

At the moment this concept has gotten quite large. The aim now is to condense it in to a short, cohesive, easy to understand form to avoid any possible confusion and to narrow down our direction of approach towards this project.

In addition, we've already started collecting potential materials to build the retro nightingale floor with.