I went to the park almost everyday to find something special. One that led my curiosity is the missing parts of the grassland. It might be because the repeated footsteps, temporary events, or uneven sunlight gradually wear away the surface, which showing that even planned green spaces cannot remain fixed. The ground itself records movement and use, reminding me that maintenance and erosion coexist as part of the same living system.
The stone benches also displayed uneven textures — some smooth from frequent sitting, others rough and weathered by rain. These subtle differences made visible the park’s slow dialogue between human touch and natural decay. Observing these contrasts led me to think of organic not as biological, but as a process of constant exchange — where every mark, erosion, or repair becomes part of an evolving life cycle.
In terms of collecting traces, the striking visual effect created by the mirror canopy columns became a clue I wanted to embed in my outcome. The handheld scanner—with its glitching effects—became a better tool to capture surface details, and the scanning accidents caused by uneven surfaces symbolise a second, human reading and distortion of the traces.
I misunderstood the brief and explored several experiments for 3 sites. I thought all of them were worth developing further, since I don’t really want to talk with strangers, I eventually chose the circular park. I hoped not to focus on its fabulous visual impact, but rather on its meaning and exploring the unfamiliar and hidden aspects through investigation.
Perec’s investigation of The Street was the starting point of my project. Through repeated observation of familiar surroundings, he estranged the ordinary and revealed the hidden logic of urban order. The street, once seen as a stable geometric alignment, becomes an assemblage of micro-elements that together expose the city’s instability and flow. The streets in principle belong to no one, but are used, consumed, polluted, and maintained by everyone (Venturi, Brown and Izanour, 1972, pp.47).
This perception reshaped how I approached Gasholder Park, a redeveloped industrial relic. Rather than focusing on the reflective spectacle of its mirrored columns, I treated the site as a layered ruin—an artefact of continual redesign. Using an archaeological lens, I fragmented the space into small scenes and searched for human traces that reveal its ongoing transformation. The hybrid sense of the real and fictional I experienced while walking among the columns became central to my inquiry. When my investigation reached dead ends, I repeated experiments through note-taking, sketching, photography, and cyanotype. Eventually, I adopted scanning and extracting as my main method. Pressing the scanner against uneven surfaces produced errors and distortions that became metaphors for my own intervention—a second inscription upon existing traces.
My project extends Perec’s attention to everyday traces into Mattern’s infrastructural thinking, shifting from the visible order of the street to the invisible systems of maintenance and decay. In Infrastructural Tourism, Mattern sees infrastructure not as an object but as a network of relations—a living system of flows, upkeep, and human dependency. Her inversion of figure and ground revealed the tension between visibility and neglect (Mattern, 2013), which inspired my classification of traces into subtraction and addition: the black paint on the gasholder conceals rust and time (“subtraction”), while stains and stickers bring temporality back to the surface (“addition”).
Through this lens, the park appears not as a static, inorganic site but as something organic—constantly reshaped by human and environmental interactions. Regeneration and repainting both illustrate what Mattern calls infrastructure as an ongoing event (Mattern, 2013). From this observation emerged my idea of entropy and the organic: every act of maintenance (subtraction) and every trace of decay (addition) participates in a continuous cycle of disorder and renewal. Entropy here is not destruction but transformation—the process through which order dissolves into new life. The organic lies not in nature itself but in the exchange of energy, matter, and information between humans and the environment, where each trace becomes a living index of time.
I materialised this idea through thermal receipt paper, a fragile, consumable medium linked to everyday transactions. By collaging printed traces on these ephemeral surfaces and reintroducing them into the park, they became part of its ecosystem—joining its order, marking new points of entropy, and generating further organic change. The visual grammar of subtraction, addition, and entropy/organic invites viewers to read these imprints as part of a broader infrastructural literacy, echoing Mattern’s call to move from perception to awareness and action (Mattern, 2013).
By transforming traces into a living catalog and returning them to their site, I aim to turn observation into collective participation, where perception itself becomes an act of maintenance and renewal.
Reference
Perec, G. (1974) Species of Spaces and Other Places. Penguin
Mattern, S. (2013). Infrastructural Tourism. Places Journal, (2013). doi:https://doi.org/10.22269/130701.
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(Catalog View)
（Gasholder: The Relocated and Repaired Inorganic Body）
(Benches: Interfaces of Pause)
(Mirror Canopy Columns: Coexistence of Reflection and Reality)
(Ground: The Collaged Urban Picture Book)
(Grassland: The Living Stratum of Artificial Nature)
