Share to
Hello, Hello & River Lines
By : Daily tous les jours
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 17th edition
Discipline : Landscape & Territories : Grand Winner
Categories : Landscape Architecture / Landscape Architecture - Public Space : Gold Certification
Categories : Special Awards / Landscape + Art Integration : Platinum Winner
Hello, Hello and River Lines are two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District, a new district revitalizing the edge of downtown Cambridge, Ontario, as part of an initiative aiming to foster community through play and the site’s history.
- Hello Hello
The first artwork serves as the district’s main entrance, at the foot of a bridge that spans the Grand River. A radiant five-storey archway and reflective façade overlooking the river banks, Hello Hello serves as the front yard and welcome mat.
Passersby are invited to deliver a greeting or message at one of the three mic stations arrayed at the arch’s base—to their friends, a stranger, the city, or the river. (“Hello River, how are you?”) Voices travel up the archway in shafts of colour, transforming into a playful message of music and light. While voices intermingle, the wave-sculpted façade that serves as Hello Hello’s backdrop reflects the constantly evolving scene before it.
— Interactive System
When someone offers a greeting or message into one of the mic stations, their voices are modulated through a vocoder into lyrical electronic phrases, the words then transposed into echoing notes from a piano. In reconstructing the message, Hello Hello accounts for the speaker’s tone, cadence, and duration, rendering every message as unique. When multiple voices communicate together, patterns of light and sound mix into one joyful chorus.
In our Babelesque world so often confined to the size of a screen, we wanted to create a new ritual that emphasizes the music and harmonics of how we communicate, both with each other and the environment around us. Inspired by a kids’ game of broken telephone, where the inputs and outputs don’t always exactly match, Hello Hello is all about presence, the non-verbal, and what’s missing from our online communications. By using the human voice to create musical bridges between people, it’s an invitation to connect beyond words.
- River Lines
Anchoring the publicly accessible courtyard of the district, a wave-patterned interactive pavement, embedded with 62 light rings and sensors, becomes an exercise in musical collaboration.
Set only a short distance away from the Grand River, River Lines shifts the city’s attention back to its long neglected waterfront, its design and musical score highlighting how for more than a century the river has been central to the rhythms of community life.
— Interactive System
With different musical instrument sections assigned to positions across the pavement’s surface, players connect the dots to create arpeggiated clusters of notes that harmonize along with the playing of others to create one rich tapestry of music.
The central axis running diagonally across the pavement represents the high-water mark of the 1974 flood. A special soundtrack is created around this axis and played every hour, underscoring our dependence on the natural world with a moment of magical synchronicity that results from the players’ cooperative efforts.
A large screen overlooking River Lines plots the players’ movements on a colourful animated map for everyone watching.
Music emanates from the ground as if by magic. Twelve in-house tailored audio tiles were developed to have no visible hardware and blend into the pavement pattern. Their design resists outdoor conditions and is suitable for permanent installation.
Collaboration
