The Store Store

1245, North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

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The Store Store

1245, North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL, United States

Firm

YEAR

2010

This project was designed in collaboration with Graphic Designer Jimmy Luu. Our goal for this project is to create a story that, through the interaction of people walking on the street, builds into a three-dimensional real-time interactive narrative that speculates the future of commerce. Passers-by observe and interact with the installation through visual and sonic exchanges with a series of viewfinders presented by a fictional entity, Store/Store.Store/Store digitally samples the physical sensations of storefront experiences and arranges them into a catalogue of archived spatial data. As the economical practicality of the brick and mortar storefront erodes, Store/Store provides surrogate sensory encounters that mediate moments between the virtual and the real.The result is a kind of hi-tech/low-tech rotoscoping of reality that presents a new way of looking at ourselves and our immediate surroundings. By actively abstracting a viewer’s perception of their environment, we uncover a suspicion that there are hidden possibilities and narratives latent within the landscape of the street.