Mediated and composited through custom Processing software or transparency overlay, the works range in content from articulating the emergent behaviour of pedestrian crowds (Pulse Crowds) to illustrating the flow pattern of complex multi-vehicular movement through a narrow corridor of space (One Kilometre, Two Minutes). Through this mediation unique phenomena emerge, which are inherent to but not visible in the original raw video footage.

While the above works illustrate mass movement, individual form and experience are captured in the exhibition’s remaining two works: The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of Torontonian, and Movement Portraits. The Impossibility of Understanding, a video installation, depicts the experiences of three Torontonians occupying the city by focusing on the elevations of the buildings through which pedestrians and vehicles navigate, never depicting the individuals themselves. The city dwellers’ experiences of the present (represented in moving video) are eerily morphed into articulated memories of the past (via a scrolling still image that extends 30 seconds back in time). In one such portrait, the gait of a pedestrian is formally pressed upon the buildings she walks beside, causing the buildings’ representations to shift from rigid and rectilinear, to flowing and sinusoidal; in another portrait a driver who comes to a stop causes adjacent buildings to streak as if smeared with a pallet knife. In Movement Portraits, a series of composited photographs, time is also represented on the horizontal axis, causing static and slow moving elements to smear, while rendering steadily moving pedestrians and cyclists as recognisable figures. In witnessing the patterns that emerge from our movement within the fixed infrastructure of the urban environment, we become more aware of the manner in which we occupy the city, and the ways in which its infrastructure impacts our occupation of it.

Concentrated Geographies emerges from a larger body of work exploring experiences of space, and our relationship to elements of the city that are difficult to conceive of or understand due to their size, duration, or a combination of the two.