Internal Skylines
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Internal Skylines

Christine White

This project functions in a way that suits Christine White best as an artist: asking people to do weird things. Better yet, it can all be done from the comfort and safety of one’s own home! In this project, White tackles common land value assessment by asking participants to assess the emotional value of their residences, based on qualitative and subjective criteria.

Thematic

Professor

Location

Date

Value

Marie-Sophie Banville

Montreal, Qc

May 2020

I am looking for another way to assess the value of land. To do so, I need the help of participants to highlight and consider the emotional sound quality of their residences in such peculiar times. To do so, I repurpose the city of Montreal’s economic forms commonly used to create the property assessment role. With a new approach to these forms,I ask “How can land value be expressed beyond currency?” Can extracting value from land be less about property and more about reciprocity? What are the qualities and feelings associated with one’s residence, and can this be measured?

1. Mechanism 

After being introduced to the financial mechanisms of real estate, I was curious to understand more on fiscal urbanism and the role of the city’s assessment of land value. City assessment forms are filled with rows and columns of predetermined variables, represented through numbers and currency. More specifically, Montreal’s form “Statement of Income and Expenses of the Immovable” is designed to assess specific physical elements such as the number of rooms, the building’s condition or operating expenses. These are all tangible and measurable characteristics that can easily be quantified into monetary value. But within the confines of these forms I see a missing value—fluid, intangible and perhaps immeasurable: our emotional experience with land. 

2. You, me and the spaces in between 

The main task I set out to accomplish was to avoid binary, linear and numerical representation via form. It is difficult to escape the grid, not only technically but also epistemologically. It is also worth mentioning that this exploration took place in my own home during the COVID-19 pandemic. As others stayed home too, so did their cars. I noticed a huge difference in the ambient sound of my home. As urban life paused, so did the machines that pound the earth to build the next tallest skyscraper. Because I am spending much more time at home now, I notice a change in sound quality and, as the city sleeps, so can I. This is what inspired me to create my own version of land value assessment. With this two-part form, I encourage others to reflect on the sensations that arise in relation to what they hear in their homes. 

The first section “Statement of Sounds and Emotions of Residence” includes guidelines on how to assess and record the sounds that arise in one's living space, along with the emotions associated. This includes recording variables such as frequency, magnitude and duration. The second part, “Visualization of Sounds and Emotions of Residence'' offers guidelines on how to translate the recorded experience into data-visualization inspired by the work of Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec in their book “Dear Data”. This form is meant to encourage others to go beyond the graph and into something a little less finite. Perhaps it is these in-between spaces on the form that allow us to depict value that exceeds currency.  

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About

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The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary collective that engages with regulations, the rule of law and cultural norms. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives. In its attempts to query legal and behavioral urban infrastructures, the ORN specifically deploys art and design practice, culture, and methods along three axes:
Art as Subversion | Intervening in grey areas of regulation
Art as Pedagogy | Making public various forces and forms of influence
Art as Decision-Making | Reorienting modes of knowing and deliberating