Vague Terrain

While conducting the dérive, recording methods were influenced by linescape speed, or, in certain situations, by social acceptability. For example, video was utilized most often at higher speeds, usually on rail lines, and/or when visual registration of the passing environment was reasonably stark. Stop-frame photography was often utilized at automotive speeds, to capture a change in position of a noticeable element, or to record the position of a moving element relative to a static position. Occasionally, while on foot, I generated a more intimate sketch, or, at particular points of arrival, I used panoramic photography.

Two other methods of retrospective recording were conducted once each day's dérive had been completed: the cognitive trace and the narrative reconstruction. For each city, I created a cumulative line drawing for every route completed. Over time, these lines, coded by mode of travel, generated a partial reconstruction of the city as articulated by its transit networks. Intentionally impression-based, the cumulative traces also attempted to provide graphic and verbal cues as to how navigational decisions were made. To accompany these graphite perceptual traces, I faithfully kept a verbal description of every route which, accompanied by relevant photographs, comprised my blog (http://actofroute.blogspot.com).

[Blog Text Analysis]

Thus, at the end of 9 months' travel, the "data baggage" I had collected far exceeded the weight of my backpack. Over the course of the journey this quantitatively amounted to 63,402 words (10,554 vocabulary count), 6964 photos, 444 videos, dozens of informal sketches, and 12 large-scale cumulative drawings. My thesis work for my final semester at UC Berkeley was an archeological rummaging and subsequent reorganizing of this data in order to uncover and better understand the moments in each city where the zooming transit dérive began to break down, and where my spatial relationship to the city changed from one of mobile navigation to haptic captivation.

Generating a taxonomy of such stop.spaces in the global city was a multi-step process. I began by conducting a textual analysis of my blog material in order to extract what was not obvious while writing in the field. Using a concordance program, the most frequently used words unique to each city were extracted, and reconstructed into a verbal spatial description. These descriptions were used to pinpoint one particular stop.space in each city.

[Global Transit - collection of transit clips filmed during 9 months of global city travel, audio: Devotchka 'The Winner Is']

I then began to re-present these stop.spaces in each city using textual excerpts, digital diagram and drawing tools (Autocad, Illustrator, Maya), photographic and video collage, and analog and digital modeling techniques (laser-cutting, 3-d printing, stitching, etc.). The re-presentations attempt to better understand the time-velocity dynamic on each site that generates the 'wrinkle' in smoothe movement otherwise so seemingly ubiquitous in the metropolis. It is the breakage in infrastructural geometry and temporal time-tables that create the captivating quality of the unscripted pause latent in the stop.space. Articulating this quality is an imperfect and unfinished endeavor but in an era of the sporadic architectural spectacle, a re-reading of the incidental and ubiquitous urban fragment begins to suggest an alternative and opportunistic urban spatial and experiential potential.

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