This work looks at the body of the city in its intimate relationship to the human body. Can we analyze the data of the human body and city body as interrelated and intimately connected?
The City as Bodies in Movement
Working from a series of texts and discussions on temporality, public space and representation, this research/seminar/lab uses audio, video, GPS (Global Positioning Systems), and other mobile devices to explore the potential of a new kind of drawing, a mapping which is temporal and ever-changing and which looks at the body of the city in its intimate relationship to the mapping of the human body. What do calories burned, heart rate, and body mass mean as related to length and speed of travel, weather, and topography? And what does latitude and longitude of user, distance to destination, and time, and latitude mean as related to track, bearing and heart rate? Can we analyze this data of the human body and city body as interrelated and intimately connected? Can we analyze this data the way that a radiologist analyzes a CT-scan? In addition the merging of drawing (GPS) and moving image (audio/video) is explored as a hybrid tool capable of capturing place in all of its qualities. With GPS we get the absolute, certain information of the trajectory such as location, altitude, weather, heart rate, cadence, speed, duration… while audio/video captures the perceptive, bodily characteristics of the space such as imagery, ambience, texture, light, activity, conversations, sounds, expressions, etc….. The city is mapped as a temporal system with documents that are both realistic and abstract, picturesque and analytical, immersed and removed. With these mapping technologies as wearable and as extensions of the human body into the city, the students will “draw” their cities from “below” producing collective subjective maps of the interactions, movements, pauses and events that make up the daily life of their cities.
The seminar has been taken in conjunction with thesis projects and has been given as a complement to some of my studios. Visit City Visions to see some of the design work that emerges out of this way of reading the city. Below are essays and notations by me and my students and other links into the work.
read CiTy_SCAN essay by Skinner
Click box below to read Urban CiTy_SCAN, The City as Body(ies) in Movement