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Walking The City (2007)

Brief

Digitial Prints visualizing a language of communting.

Keywords

Commuting, pedestrians, 3D, OpenGL, perspective, rhythm.

Description

As we habitually move along the paths of our daily commute, we inscribe marks on the city that we inhabit. As groups of commuters, strolling down Broadway St. in Manhattan, we create a language of movement.

This series of computer-generated images proposes possible communications made from our daily motions. If we could see those texts, what would they look like? What would they say?

Perhaps they would resemble Abstract semi-random formalist markings of modern painter like Jackson Pollock? Recognizable geometrical forms? Illegible murmurings caused by a mixture of repeated and confused movements? The chanting of messages and slogans encountered everyday on subway advertisements and city billboards? The humming of this week's #1 hit on the radio? Articulations of working-class discontent and suppression ... the initial steps towards revolution?

Walking the City utilizes hundreds of pictures of pedestrians moving through the city forming crowds whose whole structure forms phrases and signs. These communications are then published as high-resolution digital prints. The stock photographs of pedestrians are typically used in architectural renderings to illustrate what a proposed space will look like once inhabited. In this case, these individual stock photographs are used as pixels or markings, a smaller part of a larger picture.

Perhaps if we were to treat our daily commute differently, exploring and discovering as curious visitors to a city, we could consciously create an effective story. Envisioning the practice of the wave at a Major League Baseball game, this story has the possibility to have some content and form, to add up to something bigger. After all, a protest is a group of people organizing themselves to represent an idea or belief. Advertisers have even utilized this beautiful and poetic construction in commercials, bringing groups of people together to form messages and logos. This experience, created and shared by the masses, could have a significant impact on our daily lives.

Media

Flickr Set