CARPARK
Collaboration with Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe, commissioned for inSite Southwestern College campus, Chula Vista, CA, 1994

As part of inSITE'94, I was invited to make a piece at Southwestern College in collaboration with Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe. After many site visits, we ended up interested in the huge moat-like parking lots that ringed the school. The lots were enormous, but they were also peripheral spaces that no one payed much attention to. We decided to propose a project that would utilize this space and make it highly noticeable. For one half day, we proposed to sort all the incoming cars by color into the 14 different parking lots at the school. Since the lots were all different sizes, this required many weekends of driving around in shopping malls and tabulating car colors to figure out which colors should be assigned to which lots. To generate awareness and enthusiasam for the event, we mounted a huge informational campaign with video, posters, and announcements read in class. Thousands of cars were flyered in the days previous to the event so that drivers would know the easiest way to park based on their car color. With the help of 50 volunteers, we sorted cars from 5 am until noon, resulting in the fields of colored cars you see below The white lot was the largest (17% of cars in San Diego were white), with red as the runner-up (13%). No one could find their car at the end of the day. An exhibition at the school several months after the event featured artifacts and documentation from the car sorting day.

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