Once again I found myself on a bus thinking about people's fear of interacting. This time I noticed that I often find myself observing people and wondering about their lives, however no matter how long I look at someone, soon after they leave the bus I will forget their faces an then their existence.
On a rare occasion a few weeks ago a woman started talking to me at the bus stop about the latest political news and we had kept chatting until she left; I can still remember her features.
This made me think how hard it is to fix a face in our mind when we don't have anything else to remember it by; when we sit in a public space we are surrounded by people that move and change without us even noticing, everyone is a stranger, everyone is a ghost but when we do interact with someone we are able to attach a personality to the otherwise quickly-fading face, transforming a ghost into a human being.
I would like to set up an installation on a bus, in which some seats would be occupied by silhouettes with screens instead of heads; on the screens there would be faces of people constantly changing and impossible to fix in one's memory, but when one would sit next to a screen, a pressure pad would make the video stop on one person and give access to its thoughts through headphones.
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