| Tori Foster | ||
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| The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian | ||
| Video installation: Mixed media, 53” x 36” x 6”, 162 minutes, looped, 2009. | ||
| The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian, (2009) | ||
“Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time.” -Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City |
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| Description | ||
| The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian, is a video installation consisting of four horizontally stacked video streams. The top three streams each depict the movement path of a different individual, each of whom live in separate regions of the city. Each stream re-presents one full day of movement through the city. Simultaneously, the fourth and bottom video stream displays a streetscape of the entirety of Toronto—from one edge of the metropolis to the other. As the camera cuts through the city, this streetscape depicts buildings, parks, bridges, cars, and pedestrians—all of the actors in the urban environment. The juxtaposition of these four streams of video offers both an opportunity to witness the ways in which individuals experience the city and to witness the city as a whole from one side to the other. Consisting of highly composited imagery, in which each stream is comprised of billions of stills, the piece merges video representation into a stills representation. Achieved through the design and implementation of custom Processing software, this produces the uncanny effect of buildings coming to life and then forced motionless into the passing of time, and lively pedestrians unwittingly paralyzed and rendered frozen in space. |
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