Memory Museum
RCA Architecture MA project :
mixed media sound installation based on 'Concrete Island' by JG Ballard
Royal College of Art Old Students Association Prize

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Location - a pedestrian underpass, Paddington, London - under 'The Westway' motorway

This was my favourite place - so I wanted to do a project that used all the qualities of the site and the urban architecture,
but without changing it with a building design. It's a place where all you can hear are the cars,
but you can't see any when you are inside - this draws on my theories of dissociated sound.

Arrival sequence and overview from the flyover

Description

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The Tourist brochures were distributed around the city

I installed proper street signs all around London pointing to the 'museum'.
These were locatedin places like Buckingham Palace [above : where the police thought I was trying to steal it!]

Picadilly Circus, Paddington Station, Notting Hill,

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The last one bellow is on Waterloo Bridge is still standing years later

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It survived on Waterloo Bridge for 16 years!


sign in 2005

sign in 2009

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Portraits of passengers in their cars travelling at 70 mph on the flyover.
Passing through the radio transmitter territory beamed from below. 

As part of the campaign to spread the myth I put 'Maitland Island'
on the Tube map and produced postcards and placed them in shops secretly so
they were bought by tourists and sent around the world.

More background can found in my interview via M-Station.

  More info on JG Ballard at Ballardian.com

Link to an article by Simon Sellers on Ballard and the built environment