Calling Home

The installation has three main components, which each embody an action related to awe: 

1. Understanding awe. Through the text of an introduction panel in front of the installation, the first step is to provide the visitor with a definition of awe - or rather, with an understanding of the vastness of the definition of awe. 
    
2. Reflecting about awe. Next, the visitor goes to one of two phone plinths, where a voice, identified as “the future New York” calls and invites the visitor to think about and describe a specific moment in which they felt awe in New York. Through this phone conversation, the visitor comes to reflect on how New York fosters this sense of awe - and how it can keep on doing so in the future. 
    
3. Visioning the collective future. Once the visitor has told their personal story of awe, and thus finished their conversation with “the future” on the phone, they go on to take a look at the “Calling Home” house, which is a sculptural artifact, designed as a multifaceted house building, with a patchwork of windows through which the visitor can look into an ever-growing image gallery that displays those shared stories.  Among the images of stories of awe, the visitor can see their own - and each individual one adds up to build a collective archive of awe. 

The installation was built for two of the events of Team Wonder in New York in October 2025: the Wonder Salon at the Museo del Barrio and the Wonder Fest at Sunset park library. Both events were open to all New Yorkers, and featured art, performances, talks and activities, all around the feeling of “awe” and its necessity in current times as a positive approach through which to imagine the New York of the future - whether from the perspective of urban planning, community engagement, art, public policy… As such, to build an installation for this occasion, we wanted to go beyond the macroscopic reading of New York, and speak about a massive city from a smaller scale. That led us to hone in on personal, individual stories of the city, rather than try to get a generalised big picture of everything. In the same vein, rather than portraying New York's future as abstract or intangible, we wanted the installation to think of it as something concrete, personal, and real.

We used the AI image generator Dall-E to generate the images for each personal story, which would then be displayed in the collective archive of memories. Layering and mixing all of these wildly varied and personal images of memories, we aimed to evoke the aesthetic of an collage, as if New York itself, in its diversity, were a collage of people, cultures, experiences and places. To channel this idea, we trained our AI model to generate these images with a kind of printed texture and analog collage feel, so that they’d feel warm, material, but eclectic, too. As such, when a visitor peered into the gallery, they’d see a very varied collection of images, but with a common “coziness”, or “homeliness” to them - to give an idea of unity through diversity.

The house structure was purposefully designed to reflect the layered and multifaceted nature of New York. To do so, we focused on one of the city’s most iconic architectural details: its windows. Each window in the installation was based on a real reference we gathered during our research on different neighborhoods across the five boroughs. By embedding these diverse window styles into the sculpture, the house became a visual metaphor for the plurality of New York.

Although we tested some aspects of the installation in our studio in Barcelona - for instance, the landline phone, and the gallery projection of images - the house part of Calling Home was assembled on-site in New York, working with Afoam, a NYC-based design and fabrication studio. Together, we built the installation such that it could also be moved from one event location to another, as well as, eventually, adapted to other cities, too. This meant designing each component to be easy to disassemble, transport, and reconfigure, without damaging the visual and emotional coherence of the piece.

The ambient sound - emanating from the little house, which the visitor heard when they looked at the image gallery through a window - was built entirely from recordings gathered from radio aporee (include hyperlink to website), a platform where users map their cities through all kinds of located sounds. We created an audio engine that blended real-time these various recordings into a single evolving New York soundscape, bringing different intimate everyday moments together, from a casual café talk in Queens to the crisp ambience of a walk through Harlem.

Calling Home in data 
Through the two events in October 2025, were generated 132 images in total - 110 in English, 18 in Spanish, and 4 in Mandarin Chinese.