Up And Down: North Berkeley BART Station

Up And Down: North Berkeley BART Station, a video by Hamish Reid.

2017: the daily experience of passing through North Berkeley BART station, captured on an iPhone.

I took San Francisco Bay Area’s BART to work every day for a couple of decades (I still use it semi-regularly). The geometries, the colors, the movements, the crowding, the noise… it could be annoying and overwhelming, or intriguing and mesmerizing, and sometimes even relaxing (I’m like that), but it was always mechanical. So I used my iPhone over several months to furtively capture shaky little clips of the experience of going through a single station — North Berkeley — and recorded a bunch of found sounds in the station for the soundtrack as well. And yes, it was difficult finding times when the place wasn’t crowded — some of this was done at 6am.