“Point de fuite.” Photo by MTL Guy on Flickr.
I was going to wait until I’d seen it myself before writing about it, but Fagstein has beat me to the punch: there’s a spooky metro car going around on the orange line.
Spacing Montreal contributor Jacob Larsen was the first to tell me, at our last meeting, about his strange experience of riding in a metro car with a dark blue interior and creepy music playing over the PA system. Then, earlier this evening, my friend Mary told me that she too was in dark blue metro car when a woman’s voice could be heard saying, in Mandarin, “I think the next station is Berri-UQAM. It’s such a nice day out! That woman over there is cute. Oh, that other woman looks sad. But it’s such a nice day out!”
The spooky metro car is an initiative by the artist Rose-Marie Goulet called Point de fuite. Goulet was interviewed last month on Radio-Canada’s morning show. The goal of the project, she said, was to reach out to “people who don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go to a place where they can see art, like a gallery or a museum. Why not have a work of art in our daily lives that can change attitudes, to provoke discussion amongst people in the metro?” In a nod to Montreal’s multilingualism, the audio clips in “Point de fuite” are in French, English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic.
“The ambient sound in the metro is very loud, up to 85 decibels, so we created sound ‘bubbles’ that interfere with our own aural space,” added Goulet. “The idea was to create another voyage, by sound and sight, beyond the trip that we take every day.”
(Check out a cell phone video of the car here.)
I’d love to experience the installation myself, if only to see how passengers react. Unfortunately, many metro commuters are shoe-gazing zombies, so the effect of the art might be lost, at least at rush hour. “A lot of people on my train turned their heads wondering who was carrying speakers,” observes Fagstein. “The sound is surprisingly clear, and just a little bit louder than the station announcements. Reaction was sadly underwhelming. People coming home from work are amazingly uninterested in things going on around them.”
Point de fuite will ride the rails for another six months, eventually taking the blue and yellow lines as well as the orange. Pretty much the only way to experience it is to encounter it randomly. If you want to hunt it down, though (and I have no idea how that would be possible), you’ll find it in the centre car of the number 78-007 metro train.
8 comments
Woaw, that is a fantastic story. And “random encounter” just sounds like meeting that elusive rare boss in a game like Final Fantasy (or rare game, in the game that Laine plays :D).
-C
I had the weirdest experience on this train!
I was listening to my iPod and I started to think it was shorting out or something… and then my cell phone started to ring (around Berri-UQAM you get reception underground) and I thought it was maybe causing weird interference…
It was strange and awesome.
I like that this (unlike most initiatives in the ‘live with culture’ campaign in toronto) speaks to the experience specific to taking the metro. I hope more of these come up!
While the story is now a few weeks old, I thought it’d be appropriate to mention that I walked into this spooky car yesterday afternoon. Since nobody had expected it, or knew what it was, everyone was on edge and uncomfortable. Even the disinterested iPod listeners seemed unable to get around unfamiliar surroundings.
This came at a perfect time for me. I’m writing a surrealist piece about the metro, climaxing in a hallucinatory episode that I had briefly on the orange line.
I have been on this train car. Here is what I thought about the installation. I thought it was a brilliant idea to try to bring art to people who usually don’t go to museums and gallery. I thought the visuals were great. There were pictures of old buildings and some messages on the windows.
However, I am not sure how effective the music portion was. Most people were on the metro felt awkward with the sound, and stop paying attention a couple minutes later. The ambient was loud enough to be heard over the metro noise, but the mixture made it feel very weird. I had a hard time understand the spoken part of the audio. The sound made me feel like I was back at Disneyland or something.
I hope future improved projects like these shows up.
“Many metro commuters are shoe-gazing zombies”. Here’s another perspective. Many metro commuters work for a living, 9-5, and the metro is sort of the last sanctuary on the way home to try to take a nap, listen to music, read a book. Can you imagine having jarring loud sounds playing at random intervals being at all appealing after a stressful day? When I rode it I saw tired, stressed out people jumping every time some siren or bird sound started blaring, and all they were doing was just trying to read a book or unwind. While I appreciate the idea (despite its proselytizing overtones) the implementation could definitely use some work.
One positive thing is the visual aspect. The lack of ads is extremely refreshing.
I disagree about the effect being lost. One segment in the installation is the loud laughter. The result is quite amusing. People look up, look around smiling, at each other! How often do you see that, strangers smiling at each other an early morning like this…early in the morning on their way to work. When I stepped of the cart, I looked at the passengers getting of our cart, and those from the others. People had a lot more spring in their step that got of this ‘blue wonder’. Three thumbs up on my part, hope to see more art on the STM in the future…
I finally got this metro car today!
Even though I was tired after work, this blue car made me feel refreshing and happy during the ride.