PEDESTRIAN LEVITATION . NET
- AN ARTWORK IN PUBLIC SPACE
by thomas laureyssens


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The work is installed at a medium crowded place with an architecturally interesting wall. Nearby is a street with one or more pedestrian crossings. The character of the flow of pedestrians is an important aspect of the work.

The movement of the pedestrians is recorded with a camera from a high place like the roof of a building. A pattern of movement of the pedestrians is extracted by reworking this recording frame by frame with video animation software: it is as if pedestrians draw lines though the space.
From this pattern, some dominant directions can be found. These directions will not be exactly what the urbanist foresaw when designing the public space at the location, but be the real flow, the real use of the city by its inhabitants. See the video.




The movement of the pedestrians could be regarded as force-vectors thought the space. A person's trajectory from A -> B is nearly never a straight line, as many obstacles are in the way (like buildings), imposed trajectories (pedestrian crossings, sidewalks) and physical limitations (gravity). At this point a question is asked: how would the pedestrians move when they were not limited by anything? What could their trajectory be? The results of these thought processes could never be scientifically correct, but are an artistic interpretation in nature.

The real pattern of movement, extracted from the video-recording, is used as a grid in the visualisation process of the movements. The visual language inspired by the way engineers visualise forcefields, irregular white triangles are applied on the pavement. The direction of a triangle on a certain spot will be the dominant direction of the pedestrians at this spot. However, the closer to the wall, the closer to the virtual part of the landscape artwork. Triangles that reflect the real patterns of movement are rotated towards the wall, as if it were iron attracted by a magnetic force.

The chosen wall available for the landscape artwork, the canvas of the work, has an important function in the designprocess. This wall acts an anti-gravity field that deflects the real movements of the pedestrians towards a movement in virtual space. The design on the wall is based on extending the dominant directions of the movement as if there was no wall, no physical restriction.


OUTLINE | WORK PROCESS | IMAGES | DOWNLOADS | CONTACT