Living As Form

Creative Time commissioned Megawords to create an installation as part of Living as Form. The exhibition provides a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art. It took place in the historic Essex Street Market in New York City's Lower East Side.

We decided to create space where “doing nothing is acceptable.” This outpost was designed as a space to encourage various forms of engagement: learning, eating, seeing, conversing, and collaborating. We used video projections, paint, sound installations, and other interventions to create an immersive environment inspired in part by some of the abandoned warehouses that we spent time in during our youth. These teenage hangouts—filled with reclaimed furniture, televisions, posters, and graffiti—were self-initiated zones of freedom that evoked the spirit of potential action and possibility. The installation also served as the distribution point for a special issue of Megawords magazine created for Living as Form, in which the ideas explored in the installation were re-contextualized in print. Finally, an old photocopy machine allowed visitors to easily reproduce any of the materials they discover in the space, producing an open-source publishing system.