Project 4: Flaneur (Project Dissection) A little bit boring-you have been warned

Task: To analyze what is expected within our new assignment -which is to design and build a piece of 'Flaneur Apparatus'.



"In this project we want you to invent and make new video equipment that allows you to visualize the city in new ways: That allows us to see the previously inaccessible/unnoticed features or events and reveals something new about them to us in a time based visualization". -which all in all is a bit of a mouthful.

Flaneur (as Developed by Charles Baudelaire) is a person who walks the city in order to experience. To me it represents a someone who witnesses a certain vision of the city ungoverned by the rules we all live by, being part of big-city life. It is someone who takes in the entirety of the city, the innocent and the malevolent, because they view the city unbiasedly. Flaneur as stated in our brief "is a theoretical stance to examine and explore modernity and the urban convention."

Experimental Visualization allowing us to visualize the city in new ways.  Again taking snippets of the brief to explain further -"Experimental Approach to visualization involves generating visualizations of the unseen patterns, moods and systems of the city.  This might include physical, performative and/or digital approach."

I'm still potentially a little weary of what exactly we are to be doing with this aspect of the brief.  We have been through a few vis. exercises in the first week of the semester, but this seems more in-depth than the large scale brainstorm sessions and mind-maps from prior.

I guess the easiest way to describe the project in my own words would be that this brief is a sort of bastard amalgamation of everything we've done so far.  It takes an initial engineering approach like the first structural robotics project (where my group created the 'Robox').  It then adds the filming component which we developed an understanding of within Brief two (Little Red Riding Hoodie).  Finally it runs everything through a newly written or established program -utilizing the skills we were aiming to develop with the previous Brief (Wearable Interface).