Barge culture : the ebb and flow of cultural traffic

Early moving image devices and viewing apparatus more often than not used the city as their muse. Displaying and re-representing urban views, they revealed the spaces of illusion in our everyday environment, offering prefilmic spectacles to a receptive public.

Social as much as than architectural, this interest in observing our immediate environment has provided us with a rich history of the relationship between architecture and the human body. Early films such as Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera and Laing's Metropolis create an interplay between the viewer and their spatiotemporal confines. The ability in film to manipulate time through freeze framing and slowing, and the multiplication and acceleration of movement, renders time as something elastic and magical. In the structures of many modern films such as Memento and Mulholland Drive, narrative structures are played with and chopped up, representing in themselves a fracturing of thought in different space-time structures.

This paper reflects on urbanism and the ways in which artists use the city, revealing abstract notions of cultural use. It presents a curated project and a selection of works which map the city in different ways.