In the middle of the night, early in the third week of UBC classes, Fall 2014, a strange installation appeared in the new square that’s being completed out front of the University Bookstore and across the way from the soon-to-be-completed new SUB.
It looked like a billboard.
But it wasn’t advertising anything.
Instead, it depicted the space right in front of the board, but completely empty of people.
That space, the University has decided, will be called Achievement Square. And it’s intended to be a high traffic zone where people can congregate and express themselves.
The billboard wasn’t advertising Achievement Square, however. It was asking passersby to envision the space as they might like to see it in the future.
Fridge Magnet Game. Wha…?
But on the other side, it became pretty clear. Dozens of little people, fridge magnet style, campus citizens in minature, available for you to arrnage in patterns of your choosing, doing whatever you think they would be doing, in combinations or by themselves.
People didn’t need instructions. Fridge Magnets is like a universal language.
A day or so after install, the new square had been envisioned over and over again, hundreds of times.
Some visions were just what you’d expect:
Romantic congress. Observation. Critical distance. That’s pretty much campus life right there.
Go visit The Achievement Square Fridge Magnet Game out front of the UBC Bookstore, a collaboration between UBC Creative Writing, the artist Byron “Cameraman” Dauncey, and the UBC SEEDS Program (social economic ecological development studies), which is itself part of UBC Campus and Community Planning.
Come down and play the Fridge Magnet Game. There are no rules. There are no age restrictions.
