CARPARK

As part of inSITE'94, I was invited to make a piece at Southwestern College in collaboration with Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe. We decided to focus on the huge moat-like parking lots that ringed the school. The lots were enormous, but they were also peripheral spaces that no one paid much attention to. We proposed a project that would shift the attention away from the school buildings at the center of campus and activate this space instead. For one half day, we proposed to sort all the incoming cars by color. 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 enthusiasm 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. On the day of the event and with the help of fifty volunteer traffic directors and car sorters, we sorted more than 10,000 cars between 5 AM until noon, resulting in fields of colored cars. Some lots were extremely small (the “metallic raspberry” lot held only a few cars), whereas others, such as the white lot (17% of cars in San Diego were white) were vast. There were fourteen lots of varying sizes separated into seventeen discrete colors. No one could find their car at the end of the day. An exhibition at the school several months after the CARPARK event featured artifacts and documentation from the car sorting day.