A couple of days ago we got told to explore the library with fresh eyes. We had three instructions to develop from.
- 1) Sit and record thoughts and responses to the place chosen
- 2) Watch a site and describe in detail what happens
- 3) Sit and listen and record everything that you hear.
We chose to listen and record everything that we hear. At first we went to the third floor which we thought would be very interesting as it is described as the ‘silent’ floor. When I have been up there before working, I believed it was very quiet as people are forbidden to talk. However, when we went up there and sat and listened, we recorded something very different.
Although the third floor is meant to be the silent floor, it completely contradicts itself as the library is the one making the noise. With the printers printing pages after pages, it’s doors so heavy banging against it’s frame and the keyboards making sure that they are heard above the other noises. Maybe because this floor is ‘quiet’, everything seems to be amplified and the library is being heard for what it actually is, a working space.
On the second floor, the contrast was definitely noticeable. I could not hear the Library in the same way I did with the third floor. The natural sounds were lost in the conversations between one person and another, or even on the phone; crisp packets russeling and the fizz escaping from Coca-Cola bottles. This was the same for the first floor and worsened on the ground floor. It was as if the typical “library rules” of being quiet and doing work were trying to escape the closer to the exit we were.
This really made me think about breaking the rules of the Library as part of the performance. What boundirescan we push?
Photo-Spencer, Jessica: 3rd Floor, 2014