In a more recent one of my studies of cities, the exploration of the merging of the vocabularies of drawing and moving image which aims to read and write the city simultaneously through its abstraction and its reality came closer to defining the city as a “manifold story that has neither author nor spectator”. BiCi_N (fig. 5), examines the city of Barcelona through the CT-scan idea but not from one single point of view or axis but from a multiplicity of views. As a Multislice CT-scan, in this case, images are not restricted to one axial plane but can be adjacent, distant and overlapped. (15) The project utilized the recently instituted Barcelona open public bicycle transportation system Bicing, in which individual users of the city can pick up a bike at any of the 300 stations in the city, ride it and drop it off at another location, as the framework by which to collect the information. In the BiCi_N project the bikes are equipped not only with audio/video cameras but also with GPS (Global Positioning Systems) devices. What is collected, “fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” writes the city from within and from the multiplicity of the routine of the city as individual users displace themselves within the city on the moving bikes as they go about their individual routines. With the body(ies)/bike(s) as extensions of the human body into the city body and as drawing apparatuses, numerous itineraries are collected. As individual slices of a body under analysis these are reassembled to describe the city as alive, moving and changing - as “daily and indefinitely other.”1
5 See CT-scan in wikipedia
See the Bicing bike station map
Visit Bicing
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