Immersive Mappings in Audio/Video and Installation

Architecture, spaces, cities… are not static but rather dynamic and ever changing entities. The city, which is composed of activities, interactions, patterns of use, changes, is dynamic and temporal. As James Corner states in The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention; “The experiences of space cannot be separated from the events that happen in it” (1). Mapping practices, which have evolved from the experiential to the pictorial to the mathematical and abstract, more often have failed to combine these various important aspects which describe a place. Michel de Certeau in Walking the City argues that the plan-like image of a city as seen from above is nothing else but a “viewpoint… a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices”. He argues for the experience of wandering through the city as a “process of appropriation of the topographical system” (2). In my work and the work of my students, the audio/video camera has been employed as a medium with which to combine the various characteristics that make up place. It has been important to be both immersed as well as removed, to be both realistic and abstract, to be picturesque and analytical. In addition, we have experimented with the merging of two vocabularies: that of architectural drawing and that of moving image as a way to rediscover both vocabularies and as a way to achieve readings of place that are both qualitative and quantitative. In this essay, various mappings and notations of cities done through the exploitation of the audio/video camera as a mapping medium will be introduced