Project Overview

Hello, Hello and River Lines are two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District, a new district revitalizing the edge of downtown Cambridge, Ontario, as part of an initiative aiming to foster community through play and the site’s history.

Project Commissioner

Hip Developments

Project Creator

Daily tous les jours

Project Brief

Hello, Hello

A radiant five-storey archway and reflective façade overlooking the banks of the Grand River, Hello, Hello serves as the front yard and welcome mat for a new district revitalizing the edge of Cambridge’s downtown.

Passersby are invited to deliver a greeting or message at one of the three mic stations arrayed at the arch’s base—to their friends, a stranger, the city, or the river. (“Hello River, how are you?”) Voices travel up the archway in shafts of color, transforming into a playful message of music and light. While voices intermingle to create a singular harmonic moment, the wave-sculpted façade that serves as Hello, Hello’s backdrop reflects the constantly evolving scene before it.

River Lines

Installed at one end of the Gaslight’s inner courtyard—a multi-purpose event space that is also the city’s largest public plaza—River Lines tells a story in which the city’s past and present overlap, using the river and flood line as our thread.

Anchoring this publicly accessible courtyard, this wave-patterned interactive pavement embedded with 62 light rings and sensors becomes a joyful exercise in musical collaboration.
Set only a short distance away from the Grand River, River Lines shifts the city’s attention back to its long-neglected waterfront, its design and musical score highlighting how for more than a century the river has been central to the rhythms of community life.

Project Innovation/Need

Daily tous les jours leads an emergent field of practice that combines interactive art, storytelling, performance, and urban design to reinvent living together in the 21st century. Hello, Hello contributes to this mission by offering a new way to greet each other in public space, while River Lines invites strangers to connect and collaborate to create music. Their multi-sensory and interactive format stimulates creativity and collaboration, transforming words into a crowd-sourced concerto, animating an urban-scale landmark, and further inviting to play and transform the city.
Hello, Hello & River Lines ignite social interaction while creating a suspended collective moment to take in the natural and urban landscape.

We believe these little connections between people outside their echo chambers can go a long way. Building on the words of American political philosopher Michael Sandel: “Democracy does not require perfect equality. But what it does require is that people from different backgrounds encounter one another, bump up against one another, in the course of our everyday lives.” Hello, Hello and River Lines creates a strange moment for strangers to come together, one musical message at a time.

Design Challenge

In our Babelesque world so often confined to the size of a screen, we wanted to create a new ritual that reminds people of the importance of physical connections.

These interactive installations are ones where we achieve more together than alone, designed to bring strangers together in a spirit of play, cooperation, and creativity, no matter their age, their ability or the language they speak.

Hello, Hello is a ritual that emphasizes the music and harmonics of how we communicate, both with humans and the environment around us. Inspired by a kids’ game of broken telephone, where the inputs and outputs don’t always exactly match, Hello, Hello is all about presence, the non-verbal, and what’s missing from our online communications. By using the human voice to create musical bridges between people, it’s an invitation to connect beyond words.

River Lines, with its different instrument sections assigned to positions across the pavement’s surface, invites players to connect the dots to create arpeggiated clusters of notes that harmonize along with the playing of others to create one rich tapestry of music. A large screen overlooking River Lines plots the players’ movements on a colourful animated map for everyone watching.
Music emanates from the ground as if by magic. Twelve in-house tailored audio tiles were developed to have no visible hardware and blend into the pavement pattern. The entire piece is made to resist outdoor conditions and is suitable for permanent installation.

Sustainability

Hello, Hello and River Lines are two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District in Cambridge, Ontario, as part of the developer’s vision of creating “Joy Experiments”—public realm interventions designed to foster community through play.

The Gaslight District is a mixed-use development built on the site of a 19th-century foundry that was the engine for much of the region’s early industrialization. For the team at HIP Developments, all proud Cambridge locals, the district is something of a legacy project, an ambitious effort to revitalize their historic downtown and make it a place of connection and culture for the larger community, embracing more progressive ideas about urban development.

Our methodology is based on designing for multiple levels of sustainability:
- the choice of materials was made with care for durability, as both artworks were made to last in time
- Hello, Hello’s arch support was made of unpainted aluminum for ease of future use
- aiming for the smallest carbon footprint possible by using local providers

We are also offsetting the carbon footprints of our artworks by buying carbon credits to Planetair (a non-profit organization recommended by Équiterre and the David Suzuki Foundation).