Mapping the City in Movement: the Car as an A/V Apparatus

“…our experience of the city, and hence our response to architecture, is almost exclusively conducted through the medium of the automobile: the car defines our space whether we are driving, being driven or avoiding being driven over. The car has been an integral part of metropolitan life for so long that it has become part of the urban fabric.” Jonathan Bell, Carchitecture. This DVD presents a series of audio/video mappings of the city in movement - an organizational condition which is derived from our car culture, a culture in movement. In these studies the digital audio/video camera, a device which allows us to explicitly record movement and change in time, is used as an investigative tool and as an extension of our bodies in order to observe, capture and measure otherwise imperceptible moments of our moving and fast paced experience of place. The projects are from a seminar/studio entitled A/V Mappings and Notations. This research looks at the merging of moving image and more conventional drawing to create maps which read physical and ephemeral conditions of place in an experiential and analytical manner. The importance of The Car as an A/V Apparatus studies is that they allow us to uncover characteristics of place that are particular to the infrastructure of our car cities and most importantly to the experience of inhabiting the transitory spaces of these cities in movement. The projects which will be presented extend the human body into the city via the car as an audio/video apparatus, an instrument for reading and measuring the city in movement. The documents are choreographed as sections through the city in which the section cut (the line drawn) is the trajectory of driving/drawing. In the making of these full-scale life size drawings, cameras are mounted to the car prior to driving. The location(s) of camera(s) are determined by the specifics of each investigation. What is choreographed is the set up of the car as an audio/video apparatus and of the trajectory of driving. The apparatus itself, the body/car/camera, in its trajectory captures, studies, measures, draws/drives. This as an extension of the human body allows us to detach ourselves from the dominance of our vision and to more objectively discover aspects of place as related to our movement and corporeal experience and otherwise hidden from our perception. In addition and more importantly as body/car/camera, the apparatus captures the city at the scale of driving (corpor/car) a scale which expands our body into the scale of a larger space of great distances, movements, speeds, and durations. The discoveries that these mappings reveal inform us of the potential for more specifically intervening in these cities with proposals which engage these two drastically different yet intricately connected scales. A Cross-Section (version 1) 00:46, (version 2) 00:46 Signals and Maneuvers Car and City 03:15 Gear Shift / Tangent City 02:30 Automoscope 01:30 Mapping a Small City 01:59 Gas Up Mapping: Mapping in Time 03:56 Inter[sur]face 02:30 This is a series of videos/ a paper can also be developed, a sample video is ready to sen