IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

This paper extends on my current PhD project, a practice-led investigation situated in the School of Art at UNSW Art & Design, Australia. The project is a reconsideration of the practice of psychogeography through my lens as a woman artist and walker. In this presentation I will share my recent experiences of walking 1000km through the modern urban city of Sydney, Australia. Conducted over 40 consecutive days, I walked 25-30km each day, employing the psychogeographic techniques of derive and detournement to explore my phenomenological and cognitive responses to environment. No maps or digital devices were used to aid navigation. During my walking investigations throughout the city, I worked with UNSW’s Creative Robotics Lab to capture a series of biometric measurements. The data collected includes the analysis of my body posture, walking gait, balance, movement patterns and the monitoring of my heart rate over the course of the study. I will use this data, representing the changes in my body mapped by the city environment, to create a series of sound works (using the techniques of sonification and musification), producing a set of creative responses for exhibition. This is a story of space the space between my body and the city bumped into swam over squeezed into confined corners made small to accommodate those bodies that take space without question.