Locative Media & The City

Since I was sick on Thursday and haven’t rented the Minority Report yet, I thought I would comment further on my project for this week’s blog instead.

There are a few different preconceived thoughts I had about the project before I began my 8 hr observation. I felt that if I was on a city bench, a building lobby, or looking out a coffee shop window, I would see many repetitions of behavior. Most people seem to move through city space in the same way, much like the patterns of behavior that Chris observed in the elevator. This is part of why I chose to observe the grassy area on Bidwell during a time that I knew an event would take place. I wanted to observe not only patterns of behavior, but also how a place gets transformed based on its inhabitants. I also was very concerned with being inconspicuous, because when someone knows they are being observed, their behavior is no longer natural.

Through the photography, I tired to convey the spatial area that I was observing. The edges were marked by the street meeting the grass, and I found it interesting when the produce spilled a bit into the street, moving the lines a little. Within the blank space, a kind of order was created by the temporary inhabitants. Physically, a circular, muddy path, was worn around the line of tables. Behaviorally, there were two main types that I observed. Those who were moving through quickly to buy their products and move on, and those who came to visit, socialize, or amble through the space casually observing. There was a man who disrupted this order when he rode his bicycle through the space with a stereo blasting hip hop. Everyone stared, and it was obvious that they were uncomfortable with the disruption of the order that had been created. He wandered around for a bit, not to look at the products, but just to be heard, and there was a visible return to normalcy (a temporary normalcy that existed only for the time of the event) when he left. I also was a disruption to the order, and despite my efforts to hide my camera under my raincoat hood, I was not inconspicuous.

I also started the 8 hours with a visualization of capturing the space empty, then the set up, then movement and activity, and then the blank canvas when it was torn down. However, just as the last few vendors packed their cars, a new truck pulled up and two men set up a tent with music smack in the middle of the space. While it wasn’t what I had expected, I enjoyed witnessing the way the space fluidly changed from one purpose to another. Likewise, I had been wandering along the tables and was completely surprised when I turned around and saw the formation of the “Silent Vigil” in the middle of the day. One second the sidewalk was just a sidewalk, and the next it was a platform for a protest. It was truly a canvas, similar to the way city streets are a blank canvas constantly rewritten by those that walk them or linger along them.