TYPE: MAPPING EVENT EVENT: LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE 2018 LOCATION: HACKNEY WICK, LONDON (UK)
HEARTBIT WALKS
The HeartBit Walks was designed as a psychogeographic mapping project for the London Festival of Architecture 2018. The project explored a wide section of diverse urban fabric, stretching from the newly redeveloped Olympic Park, through the post-industrial area of Hackney Wick, and across the A12 highway.
The gathering involved 25 participants. Emotional data (Galvanic Skin Response) were collected during short group walks and visualised during in-situ group discussions. Particular focus was placed on differences between individual and summative experiences visualised as situated three-dimensional models and dynamic animations. In the overall these visualisations compose a rich visual index of the event that by rendering the differently-able perspectives with granular definition offers a multi-scalar photography of the experience.
Despite in fact the results not being of relevance for statistic purpose, they certainly shed critical insights on the dynamics of the group explorations and pedestrian mobility issues in the area.
The project constitutes a first attempt to observe digital dérive methods as metastatic processes of creation of group knowledge, where the individual reactions to the accidents, informed by a diverse range of physical and psychological circumstances, are analysed and mapped to explore the re-configuration of knowledge through the experiential act of walking.
With this, the project also offers a precedent for a mediated urban practice that by looking at the construction of a sensual collective knowledge that maintains traceable ties with the events and the narratives that produced the biometric reactions, also introduce a process of open attribution of significance that radically challenge previously conceived ideas of digital distributed authorship for the urban environment.
Credits
A project by FLOW Architecture (London, UK)
Partner: UCL Bartlett - Urban Design MArch
Project Team: Annarita Papeschi, Vincent Nowak, Alican Inal