As the speaker drones on about why their approach to living life is correct, your mind cannot help but wander. Yes, I’m glad your practice is doing well. Ok, I guess that makes sense. I wonder, who’s actually paying attention? Gazing around, the real show begins. The crowd becomes a sea of amusable characters. Representing an abstraction from their personal lives, each individual fascinates the public body. They take on a narrative conjured in your mind. Some you know and others you’ve never seen before assemble a reality in your imagination. Each noticed intricacy has a place in this narrative, with every observation removing that individual from their own reality to be placed in yours. Each examination is grounded. The personal reflection and comparison unto oneself create a loop of realization and critique. Engagement with this flow of judgment and reflection promotes longevity of the analytical practice. Are we acting in accordance with our own desires or merely partaking in a dance with those around us? \

As we watch and we yearn, we cannot help but define ourselves by the built world. What we observe reveals facets of our suppressed identity. Our aspirations and fears manifest themselves in what becomes apparent in others. Discomfort is found in the competition between observations of reality and the reality of those observations.The atrium embodies self-malleability of the institution. The introspective nature of the space protrudes, as our observations manifest themselves in action. The line between the identity we imagine and the identity we portray blurs. We promote a version of ourselves that we have learned from viewing others. This display of character is the culmination of all we have witnessed. We create someone who never existed. As applaus erupts from the patchwork crowd, the swift and gripping snap of reality re-enters. Standing up to leave, you notice someone leaning on the railing up above. They look at you like a mere character in a story to which you don’t belong. What are we but the culmination of the stories we tell of those around us