Year
2014
Tag
Installations
One question asks for a fact: how old are you? The next asks for a wish: how old would you like to be? Between the two is a distance that cannot be read from a date of birth.
Golden Age brought those answers into a public space. Using sections of tree trunks, we built a physical graph that accumulated participants’ current and desired ages. The surface changed as people contributed, giving a shared form to a question usually answered in private.
2014 · Ús Barcelona · Art and Public Space Festival · Art & Research / Installations.
Participants build the wooden graph in the public festival space.
Two ages in one place
The installation began with a repeated field of wooden units. As answers were added, differences in height appeared across it. Visitors could look for their own position, then compare it with the forms created by other responses.
A wish to be younger and a wish to be older could occupy the same work. Neither needed to be treated as the expected answer. The pairing allowed age to appear as something lived and imagined, shaped by circumstances that the number alone did not disclose.
Tree-trunk sections form an accumulating physical graph.
The questions and answer positions marked on the ground.
Time in the material
The tree sections brought their own visible record of growth. Cut surfaces and repeated layers placed the question of human age beside a material in which time had already left a structure.
That relationship gave the graph a second register. The data could be compared as positions and heights; the wood remained an object with texture, weight and a past. The work did not require those two readings to become identical. Their proximity gave visitors another way to stay with the question.
Participants gather around the growing graph.
The installation within the public festival space.
An answer among other answers
At Ús Barcelona, the installation formed around the people who stopped beside it. A personal response entered an arrangement that could be approached by strangers, discussed and read again as new contributions changed it.
Golden Age left the reasons for each desired age open. A physical graph could reveal an accumulation without claiming to explain every life within it. Its public form made room for the difference between the age a person is assigned and the age through which that person imagines a possibility.
How it was made
Tree-trunk sections were arranged as a physical graph of current and desired age. Repeated positions and stacked wooden units allowed responses to accumulate as visible differences in height.
Explanatory reconstruction based on the project archive. The drawing shows the installation and visitor interaction; it is not a fabrication plan. Each wooden unit represents one contribution; the separated stack illustrates their accumulation.
References
- Original DDS case study — Original project description and photographic record.
- Dwell — Domestic Data Streamers interview, 27 May 2014 — Contemporary coverage establishes the work was presented by 2014.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives.
