audio of plant walk, featuring arden
watering indoor plants
Conversations of / with / in the living world
curb_side-walk…
as site / situation becoming
When it came to situating the next phase of research I expanded out into the urban interior, specifically focusing on curb sides and side walks in my local suburbs. These urban corridors link the community and are powerful places for grass root change. I wanted to contextualise these huge issues of disassociation within the ecological crisis into my local urban community. An understanding of the benefits of walking (demanding a conscious engagement with time and place) and an interest in pschogeography and urban wandering informed walking as a process. While on walks around my local urban interior I continued a practice of attentiveness to non human entities, utilising observations as gestures for design responses. Through processes of walking and mapping I begun unpacking the ontology and ecology of the urban curb side / side walk as a more than human entity.
If we are engaged with and critically thinking about our urban environment as a living situation, can that shift the way we interact with and live within it?
home
Line work of all mapped walks.
micro - macro scale comparison
Image of curb taken on walk.
Maps from walks created on Strava app.
(relatively) micro map imagery (photography)
Images taken on walks.
collaged mapping of curb_side-walk(ing) walks
micro mappings re framed
The frame is what established territory out of the chaos of the earth.
The frame is thus the first construction, the corners, of the plane of composition.
(Elizabeth Grosz 2008)
framing / curb_side-walk is breathing
The curb side / side walk is an urban backdrop, are we desensitized to it?
Thinking through Elizabeth Groz’s theory on framing as a technique of interiorizing non human entities, I experimented with editing the micro mapping photography. Electro magnetic vision, Micro cell imagery, thermal heating and night vision have a visual likeness that is associated with seeing things that we normally can not. Scrolling the spectrum of hue and saturation on photoshopping, the images appeared in a fluid way like they were pulsing or breathing. I created a video compilation of the micro mapping images, in which I projected back into my curb side one evening.
curb_side-walk is breathing projection
curb_side-walk is breathing video