CITY VELOCITIES - BODY SPEEDS

2012|Trams, android phones, industrial fans, custom-made software, wind.

Commissioned by Sonic Acts Festival, NIMk & STEIM.

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City Velocities - Body Speeds is a project focusing on tactile experience of travel speed in urban environment. In the time of digital mediation and visualization of all real and physical, the project insists on the conviction to offer a physical experience of an omnipresent but invisible phenomena of speed. The project involves measuring velocities of several trams in Amsterdam, streaming the data to the exhibition space in real time. There, the velocities of trams are transformed into airflows recreated by several powerful fans, each blowing the air at the speed of a moving tram. The resulting situation is an impossible intersection of different speeds flowing through the centre of the space. At this intersection one is immersed in a dynamic and disembodying space - standing still, yet experiencing movement at different speeds in several directions simultaneously.

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"Walled into the tunnel of passing Time, the voyeurs-voyageurs therefore occupy not so much the carriages of a train as the acceleration of a displacement without emplacement." Paul Virilio: The Arrow of Time