Signs Of Life

2005

We humans have an almost unavoidable tendency toward narrative. The city provides evidence of lives lived within its close quarters and we create stories to fill in where visible evidence leaves off. Based on the same signs, however, different people will construct entirely different narratives. The concept of a singular reality is naïve at best. I construct my reality, you yours. We may look to history, but that’s just someone else’s take on things. So who’s to say which is the real story? Signs of Life played with the idea that every story is the real one and that no story gets it quite right.

I began the project by taking photographs of spaces throughout Pittsburgh. Each location was photographed without human occupants, but all contained evidence of human activity. I distributed these images to friends and collaborators, asking them to write a story they could imagine happening in the pictured location.

A selection of these stories, and the images that inspired them, were installed in a downtown storefront. Each narrative in the installation was labeled with a date and time, indicating when the fictional event would be performed in the real space of the city.

Signs of Life challenged the boundary between fact and fiction by staging imagined scenarios that would become authentic experiences for the ‘found audience members’ who happened to witness them.