A small box with two ways to serve one main function–to share Viennese literature with the citizens.
It’s 5 pm Friday afternoon. You are in Vienna, sitting in the subway. You had a hard day of work, a hard week of work. Now it’s finally Friday, it’s time to do something fun. But now every place you like is closed. All the museums, all the cafés, and all the bars. So you just walk home hoping for something special to happen. At the entrance of the subway station, there is a small box shining. You go closer to take a look. You push the button and there is a small piece of paper coming out. You read it. You smile.
RHYME BOX is a small box placed in the entrance of one of the subway stations of Vienna. Despite its small size it stores hundreds of short poems written by the citizens of Vienna for the citizens of Vienna. We may not even recognise how few opportunities the poets around us have to share their thoughts. Especially now, that there is a lack of social events, such as the slam poetry nights. Although we all need some inspiration in our everyday life now, that we spend most of our time at home, it seems hard to explore new things around us. Our project aims to start a cultural exchange between the habitants of Vienna by sharing poetry and books. The RHYME BOX contains a small machine inside, which could work based on the principle of a receipt printer, needing just a small pre-programmed box storing poets, and by pushing a button, it prints a random piece of art on a receipt like paper. The structure is completed with a hole on the top, this way making it possible, to not just take but also to give. Sharing old books, favourite novels and stories completes the possibilities of how the box can be used. It is made out of brass and aluminium - which are naturally self-disinfectant - and has a dimension of just 20 x 20 x 64 cm, to fit almost invisibly into the urban space, waiting for people to pass by and discover what is inside.
