City Breathes in City
Yinglu Ma
Artistic Statement
The environment profoundly impacts human psychology, evoking a spectrum of emotions, particularly in urban landscapes where diverse elements converge. Based on Social Production of Space, Situationist International and Dérive, my practice revolves around urban landscape, space, walking, maps and emotions, using these as basic elements and frameworks. In this context, I seek to further explore the sense of belonging in the city, attempting to break down the capitalist-controlled cityscape by walking in a specific environment in order to shape the inner order. This process reconfigures space based on personal experience, fostering a dialogue between spaces and between space and people.
Working across moving image, sound and installation, I aim to engage the audience in the process of integrating into a new city and to help them find similar memories of the overlapping cities. Interested in walking and maps, I consider traditional maps as the order of real space and walking as the act of breaking that order. I intend to create walking maps that are influenced by another space, exploring the connection between such maps and emotions and landscapes.
This project is based on London and other different cities, the process of integration for people coming to live in London for the first time. Through lived space and representational space, I deconstruct the city I currently live in and use walking as a tool to integrate and reconstruct the inner city. Michel de Certeau believes that “To practice space is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other”. The interweaving of space gives the city more possibilities and walking makes enunciation about space. The space created by the urbanists or architects is the "original meaning", and the walking of the city residents create the “derivative meaning”. Through my work, I strive to offer new perspectives on recognizing and articulating unfamiliar cities. My goal is to establish a connection with new cities through the natural forces of old ones, finding overlapping shadows and reinterpreting contemporary spaces.
Research Questions
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How to use the natural forces to integrate into an unfamiliar city from your former city?
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What kinds of overlapping landscapes and memories are shared between different cities?
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How does the emotional process of integration into the city relate to the urban landscape?
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In what ways do natural forces shape human emotions and experiences in urban environments?
Context
Cities often have different cultures and lives. People come to different cities for a variety of reasons, such as traveling, studying or immigrating. Throughout our lives, we may inhabit different cities, seeking new experiences and familiar echoes of the past. In this journey, we resemble a breeze from the old city, meandering through the new city—sometimes progressing smoothly, other times encountering obstacles, experiencing both the similarities and differences. Initially, every corner of the city is unfamiliar. Familiarity begins to build after exploration and obstacles. Eventually, amidst the many differences, people often capture similar moments that evoke memories and find emotional anchors. As Marco Polo says in Invisible Cities, “Everytime I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” The way that we experience and interpret it will always, to some extent, be shaped by the lens of our prior experiences and pre-existing beliefs. When we focus on a city, our viewing and experiential perspectives are often influenced by these past experiences, revealing the shadows of remembered cities beneath the new one.
Debord wrote that “Geography deals with the impact of natural forces (such as climate and soil composition),” and psychogeography should examine the “specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Memories of rivers, for example, are always similar. The rivers in cities are rich with metaphors and symbols, representing a collective consciousness. Like the river, other natural elements such as wind, trees, and even time can evoke a sense of belonging to a remembered city, being free and uncontrolled. Thus, I chose parks as the walking sites, as they are abundant with natural forces that awaken mental connections, and they offer the freedom to wander without the constraints of buildings typical of other urban spaces.
To comprehend a space is to enter and experience it authentically. On this basis, I began by researching walking and landscape within the confines of urban space, which Rebecca Solnit describes as "an odd consonance between internal and external passage". The movement of the feet is traceable and its route is influenced by the landscape of the city, which is constantly signaling and providing instructions. The external landscape is altered as a result of movement, and the internal mental landscape is constantly fluid and changing. Different ways of walking and viewing can produce vastly different mental landscapes. Artists Dennis Adams and Laurent Malone created JFK with 'Transect', a walk that captures a unique double view of the landscape. Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, an exploration of parallel realities by artists Cardiff & Miller, unfolds from a dual space. Influenced by Situationist International and the Dérive, I incorporate psychogeography and emotional disorientation into my work. Debord defines the dérive as ‘a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’ In this work I create a new type of urban drift based on two spaces, where the direction of travel is determined by the forces of nature.
Walking maps are the product of tracking footsteps and viewing landscapes. Oswald Mathias Ungers explains how maps are presented not because of their factual, measurable qualities, but because of their metaphorical potential. Through the map, the creator determines the way in which the walker should experience it. Jean-Christophe Quinton's PROMENADE À NEW YORK records the events he encounters as he travels through the city through the use of maps. And the 16th-century maps of Mexico are subjective maps, some focusing on natural objects, others on streets. In this work, I employ the triad concept of Social Production of Space proposed by Lefebvre to create maps. Traditionally, a map is a perceived space made by professionals, but the maps in this work combine the physical level of perceived space with the conscious level of lived space, allowing everyone to create maps based on their emotions and experiences.
Outcomes
https://drive.google.com/file/d/130hrWsiEtJZvRycFm232blV7ILjZrRhM/view?usp=sharing
To simulate the process of integrating into a city, I began by experimenting in perceived space and developing a set of walking rules. I enlisted three participants who shared similar sentiments and invited them to walk according to these rules. Walkers were required to dictate the direction of their walk based on the wind direction in another city at each time of day for five days. Starting from a central point in the Hyde Park, they switched to the next wind direction if they encountered an obstacle. If not, they stayed in one direction. During this time they recorded route maps and landscapes for traverses, obstacles and emotions. In total, I collected four profiles of walks based on different urban wind directions. They all walked according to the rules I set out and recorded them separately through photography, 3d scanning, text, Google Street View and created different maps.
In this act of walking, we are like a wind blowing from the former city, coming to the new city and wandering around, sometimes moving forward, sometimes spinning in place. The resulting maps illustrate our actual walking routes and emotional fluctuations—such as the sense of progress during exploration, disorientation upon encountering obstacles, and contentment upon experiencing overlapping feelings.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AkVHC6KkDj9N-rNdRjLvhQF7Q89rOIOA/view?usp=sharing
Wood material, UV Print, 270*180mm(flexible)
Building on the four walking archives, I developed an interactive game designed to engage a wider audience. This game integrates the four maps from the archives into a map puzzle featuring three colors. Each color represents a different stage of the journey, and each cube in the puzzle has four colored sides. The audience can freely combine the puzzle pieces to create their own maps. Guided by randomly appearing wind directions on the screen, participants can draw their routes on tracing paper or use stamps to mark the three phases: traverses, obstacles, and overlapping areas. Ultimately, they create a map representing their integration into the city, highlighting overlaps and connections.
Game Rules:
1. Start at the starting point and move according to the wind direction.
2. If come across a red obstacle block or boundary, switch to the next wind direction.
3. If pass a green overlapping square, change direction and move one square at a time.
4. If come across the start of a grey shuttle square, move quickly to the end of the grey traverse line segment.
The game aims to allow participants to experience the process of integrating into a city even if they are not physically walking in a real perceived space. By creating their own maps and routes, participants can challenge traditional definitions of maps and construct their inner order. This interactive approach helps the audience understand the emotional and spatial dynamics of urban integration, encouraging them to explore and redefine their relationship with new environments.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Riv8Ppw2H1GOOqBjx0mq78qreCmAmPEx/view?usp=sharing
841*841*594mm, 1’55”
The video installation serves to explain the main concept of my work, illustrating the story of using the natural forces of a former city to integrate into a new city. Utilizing TouchDesigner, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and MadMapper, I constructed a space filled with cubes as a metaphor for the similarities between cities. The video is divided into three scenes:
1. Walking with Wind: The first scene explores the relationship between wind and people walking, suggesting the idea of individuals arriving in a new city as the wind blows from their former city.
2. Stages of Integration: The second scene depicts the three stages of integrating into a new city, based on the landscapes encountered in the walking archive: traverses, obstacles, and overlaps.
3. Overlapping Cities: The third scene features images from my work Overlapping Cities, where I created imagined spaces using elements like rivers and other natural forces to highlight similarities that do not actually exist.
Through a progressive narrative that transitions from the real to the unreal, the video aims to construct a storytelling space. This space allows the audience to experience the atmosphere of the work while playing the game and engaging in dialogue with the urban environment. This interaction is designed to resonate with the audience and evoke similar experiences, fostering a deeper connection to the themes explored in the installation.
Reflection
In the process of completing this work, I gained a deeper understanding of the concepts and tried out various practices. I first developed the concept of ‘overlapping cities’ in the experimental phase. The reason why we are eager to find these overlaps is because we desperately desire a sense of familiarity and belonging in the face of strangeness. Therefore, I prefer to show the process of seeking rather than presenting an idealized conclusion, trying to create a new type of urban drift for poetic provocation. In addition, I think the most worth mentioning point of this work is the presentation of projection. The audience can easily understand the concept and atmosphere of the work when watching the video installation, which poetically narrates the journey.
During the process of the project, I also received feedback from participants and the audience. In the walking experiment stage, the other three participants felt that walking abstracted their state of mind as they tried to adapt to life in London and that the change from grey to red to green symbolized the different stages of adaptation. During the map puzzle game stage, audience feedback was that putting together a map randomly was like re-constructing the city according to their ideas. Creating a walking route represented the experience of walking with the wind. The audience gained a sense of fun and understanding of the project concept.
However, I think there are still some aspects that can be improved. Due to time and material constraints, the production of the puzzle map game is still not ideal. I think three-dimensional irregular maps can also be created to clearly show the location of landmarks and other locations. According to feedback from the game test, the audience needs to spend some time to understand the rules, which is a bit complicated. It is also worth thinking about whether the route map gained by the audience after the game can be utilized twice as well as letting them follow the route to walk.
Future Directions
Regarding the future direction of the work, I think there are many possibilities. Firstly, the map puzzle game can still be improved. Or it can be made into an online web game, with more simple and easier-to-understand rules, so that more people can experience it. Secondly, regarding the act of walking, I think it can be put into practice on a larger scale. For example, an open call on social media to get more people to participate, or it could be focused on groups such as immigrants. Then we could form practice groups of eight people and walk in different cities at the same time, depending on the direction of each other's winds. This could eventually lead to an online exhibition.
City Breathes in the City is an important attempt to develop my practice of cities and walking. I have been exploring different ways of seeing cities and walking in an attempt to find a new vitality in the current capitalist-controlled landscape. Human emotions give meaning to the city. We connect our souls to the earth, depicting and writing about it with our feet, shaping the city within us as urban planners do.
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