Storeroom 3205

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Storeroom 3205 was an installation/performance at the Staller Center for the Arts at SUNY Stonybrook in the spring of 1999. The piece itself was a long process of negotiations and actions relating to a storage room on the third floor of the Staller Center, where the Art, Music, and Theater Departments are housed. I was given a key to room 3205 after inquiring about its pair of double doors, the other side of which I had never seen. I had gained a solid reputation during my first year in graduate school as a neat freak and a fastidious broom pusher. I was told by my department chair that I could clean the old storeroom if I wanted to.

I wanted to. With my new key I entered the
space and saw gold, everywhere the glint of gold. 
I began at first to only move objects around in
order to see what exactly the room contained. It
was packed with art making equipment. So much,
in fact that I had to climb over piles of
things in order to get from one side of the room
to the other. Word began to spread of my work,
and I began to allow certain people to see my
progress. The project was otherwise a secret.
People wanted to know what was going on, and I
caught a few peeping through the cracks in the
doorways. For a few months I cataloged every
object in the room. I took note of all sorts of
details about each thing, and gave each object
a number printed on two separate tags, in case
one fell off, just to be safe. The data I
collected was entered into a generic text
document I created that could provide information
about all of the things stored in the room. After
the catalog was completed I stacked all of the
stuff against three of the four walls in the room
and constructed a new wall, effectively sealing
off access to the object archive. I then set up
an old Apple Imagewriter II printer on a table
in the center of the space and spooled a text
document assembled from individual forms that I
filled out with each object's information. The
printer ran for one week, printing thousands of
pages of text, calling into existence the objects
that were once again hidden, effectively only
existing as a bureaucratic document. Contained in
the printfile was coordinate data for each object
that corresponded to a chalk grid snapped onto
the wall. Each object's position could be located
by four points that bordered its dimensions.

When I was finished with the construction and
programming, I removed the doors to the space and
started the crontab that spooled the printfile. I
would come in every morning, go to a locker in the
hallway, change into coveralls, polish my shoes,
and perform maintenance tasks in the space. I 
allowed the text document to fan out across the
floor, but I kept the chalk lines clear, changed
the printer ink, and reloaded box after box of
paper.

The performance of the piece lasted for one week.