Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of unwanted sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. The stories describe characters immersed in social dilemmas - guilt, responsibility, legalities and banality. Voyeuristic or chance encounters are concocted from the daily habits of the story makers. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.

This blog was set up to document the process by which Gothamberg was derived. These included meetings with a group of people, each meeting they would either write a story about Gothamberg, or analyze the stories and their relationship to eachother. The group also discussed the first interfaces .

Our assignment:
1] Connect to any of the existing stories.
2] If you can, connect two stories to each other. (Doesn’t need to be more than an anecdote)

Notes: Many issues:
- We created texts that link to any story, or link two stories. Turned out that this was easy and a lot of fun. Its clear that the building will not work in conventional space, as too many stories butt up against each other. This means that the idea that Martin and I discussed, of a multi-dimensional space, makes perfect sense. The analogy of pop-up books was made, where dimensions 'fold' into each other.
- There are supposed to be multiple ways to link stories to each other. These include, at least, Characters, who may occur in multiple stories, Keywords, which people assign to their stories, and Spaces, so you would go from space to contiguous space. Keywords can be twofold, they can be what people assign to their text, but also we could run a program to search for word usage independent of people's keywords.
- Pranksters were talked about, and assigning identity to building members (anyone who writes a story). By giving people an email alias (eg. marek@gothamberg.com) it means people can be told when someone writes a story near to theirs.. or keyword/character etc. We can set up a filter for swearing, creating a special 'blue' area for those who want to go there.
- Three levels of screening: An elected Coop Board that screens new apartments etc. A Wiki Mechanism (rejected), or a Version History, where people can re-write other's texts as a new version.
- We discussed images and text, and what their relationship could be. This is deeply problematic, as we don't want either to get in the way, or be subordinate. (see Marek's Collage contribution below)

He probably thinks I don’t care because I don’t know anything else but I do remember playing with friends outside. I remember all the smells, of trees, and grass, and garbage cans, lots of smells here, too, but it’s different. It mostly smells of me, which I don’t mind, I like it, though it gets a bit boring at times. And then there’s the smell from downstairs, human, and intense. It changed a few days ago, it used to be musky and stale, now it’s more like dead rat. I often go to the window when he’s gone to get a whiff of whatever is out there, no trees, just another wall with lots of stairs going down. Sometimes there are these rubber sausages flying across the shaft below me and hitting some bags on the ledge on the other side. The bags sometimes smell like cat, and the rubber sausages splash some liquid onto them. I wish I could catch them, I don’t like the smell of the liquid, though, it’s sharp and unnatural, much worse than the cat smell.

What I miss most is running around, I wish I had some space to run. When he’s gone I sometimes race around, left corner, jump on the chair, jump on the couch, right corner. I know I’m not supposed to do it and he wouldn’t like it. I don’t know why he never takes me with him, perhaps he’s afraid something might happen to me outside. Or perhaps he just has to show he’s the master but I know that anyway. I do love him, he feeds me and lets me stay with him but I do get sick of sitting here and waiting when he’s gone. Sometimes I’m begging to come with but he doesn’t understand me, he doesn’t react. It makes me angry. I’ve been thinking about going for his legs and just squeezing by when he opens the door. Sometimes, I think about killing him. He’s bigger and he’s the leader but I know I could, that makes me feel better.

One morning I could not open my door. There was a sleeping man on the other side. First I got angry, because he was in my way. But later on I felt a little embarrassed that I had shouted at him to move. I had been morning myself in my nice bed, I had even watched the news and this guy had to wake up with a door slammed right on to his back.

After that morning he started to come back regularly. I guess he liked our staircase. My neighbor and I started to get used to having him there and when he did not show up we wondered if everything was okay. But he always came back.

The sad thing was of course that he was homeless; he did not have a place that was really his place. But it was not that pleasant for us either. The snoring was okay but he also smoked and sometimes he left the staircase in a mess. As the house was old and had mainly wood construction, it was a little bit scary to have a sleepy man smoking in the staircase. Instead of throwing him out, we decided to install fire alarms in the staircase. Some weeks later I found out that somebody had removed the battery from all of them… I guess he did not like the noise when he was smoking the last cigarette of the day.

At first Melinda was surprised that the homeless man who sleeps in the hallway on the third floor volunteered for her Phenomenology of Lint project. Then she realized it was a way for him to get his clothes cleaned. Not authorized to use the laundry room himself, Melinda volunteered to wash and dry the man’s clothes. She also slipped him some cash before they sat down in her apartment to do the oral history. Sitting across from her, now in clean clothes and freshly washed hair (she let him use her shower), Melinda saw the man for the first time. He wasn’t just the homeless man who sneaks into the building after hours most nights when its cold and sneaks out before most people leave for work in the morning, he was actually a rather interesting looking man with olive colored eyes, a fine long nose and a sweet laugh that bubbled up out of nowhere and made her small, sparsely furnished apartment feel warm and not so claustrophobic. Norman had been a professional man; he’s got three kids out in the world somewhere and an ex-wife who’s remarried; and his twin brother died not too long ago that was the hardest loss of all. It only took one or two follow-up questions before it came out that Norman sleeps outside the apartment that the smelly man used to live in because the smelly man whose name was Leonard, was his twin brother.

After Norman said good bye and thanked her for everything especially the good conversation, and she thanked Norman for his generosity in sharing his story and his lint, Melinda closed the door and began to wonder about all the stories of her students who she never has the time to really get to know, and the stories of the janitors in the Social Science building at the university, and the shopkeepers at the stores she frequents, and the token booth workers and the people who work at the Duane Reade and all the other homeless people she steps over or steers clear of going to and from the Gothamberg every day.

I’ve been here a week now and staying with Shaun, who is not a chef anymore, instead he’s a DJ at a place called the Mud Club, playing his 6 punk singles over and over. His apartment’s got an amazing view, it looks at the back of the Chelsea Hotel. Every window is like a TV set! One window, they’re screwing, in another they’re shooting up (don’t show this to..). One window, someone throws condoms full of piss at a fire escape, luckily not this one, but yesterday I got a whiff! Another wacky window has a heap on the floor and a stuffed fox on a shelf looking at us. Well, today an ambulance crew came and took the lump on the floor away, sad.

Shaun told me that if you slice a cabbage in half, that’s exactly the sound a head makes when it hits the concrete below. Tomorrow I move in to Ira’s Aunt, so may not experience that one!

Have a beer with Chris on me, when is he coming?
Soon,
Mariusz