Conceived by Bart Overly and Beth Blostein, this competition winning entry was filmed, formatted and realized during a quarter long seminar at the Ohio State University.
Text below was originally taken from www.blostein/overly.com and modified.
The opening postcard served as the catalyst for this competition entry; Columbus, Ohio - High Street circa 1950s, alive in neon, color, and nightlife. Most of what we see is gone today, stripped away by attrition, demolition, and a shifting elsewhere of the things that make downtowns come alive: bars, restaurants, clubs, galleries, shops, street front offices. Sponsored by the arts community and civic leadership, “Window Fills” was a competition open to artists and designers looking for solutions to “decorate” vacant storefronts in the transitional downtown over the holiday season. Proposed by Bart Overly, of Blostein / Overly Architects, “You Were Here: A Soap Opera” was the winning submission. As a former student of Bart Overly, I was one of six students he chose to execute his “Soap Opera.” The project was designed and installed in an eight week period in autumn 2003, and opened to the public for a six week run beginning November 23, 2003. The installation transformed a three block area of the downtown for a budget of just $10,000.
“You Were Here” was conceived as both a “rebuilding” of the postcard and a commentary on misguided, spraw-supportive development efforts in the Columbus metro area. A series of five vacant and derelict storefronts were selected and rear projection video systems installed within each. The storefront glass was “soaped” to make a semi-transparent pearlescent screen, onto which neon-filtered, multi-speed video was projected. Each location had its own custom sized video of full scale activity that “was there” at some point in time, however the content was imported from active “suburban” and “new urban” locations throughout the city. As day turned into night, the street transformed into a theater of neon color and light.
