#criticalselfie

The ideas from the photo's I want to portray from the view of the Flaneur that is wondering through the streets of Wellington City, is that the streets are all structured. Everything is structured. From the architecture of buildings, to the composition of the promotional advertisement posters and cultural art hidden along the alley ways away from the street roads. All of these make up what a city is. This is a reflection of being a Flaneur.

In 2008, Lucas states;

Siting the investigation in the city reflects my own interests which are rooted in my architectural training. It also serves as the context for my own creative practice (pp176).

 The ideas that come out of this quote is that the Flaneur is someone that studies the city, the streets, the alleyways, and everything in between. The images taken reflect structure and culture of the city. How structure has taken formed order into the city. Everything is in order with the structure of the buildings, and the composition of posters and cultural art hidden along the alleyways also exhibit structured.

 When you compare the structure of buildings to the structure in an alleyway shown in the slides that there is more creativity in the alleyway, more freedom and liberty to showcase our culture and emotions of humans that live in the city. Whereas the buildings showcase the side of order in a way of expressing the busy corporate working place, a place of constant structural boundaries.

(Word Count 246)

Quantified Flaneur

 When moving through our urban space we tend to notice trends. We see patterns emerge in our rationalized surroundings, reflecting back the quantified nature of the city. I have concentrated on the juxtaposition of the organic movements of the flaneur and the regimented quantified approach of gamification. How can both exist when the other is present and do they interact? Using a thematic colour to create a ‘punctum’ as Barthes (1981) described them, a punctuation in my depiction of the city. “The punctum is a rupture, a discontinuation in the fabric of received knowledge .” The orange punctum to me represents the unnatural and stand out nature of gamification, the colour is a metaphor for the rationalisation and creation of social control in a public space. The rationalization that the flaneur was working against is  a constant battle,  gamified social control  is an environment centred on efficiency not simply existing in a space (deWinter, Kocurek, Kocurek, 2014). This fascinating pairing of the flaneur experience and gamification I believe shows two elements of modern life, often pitched against one another. Finding both in our day to day lives. I created hyperbolic representation of gamification to show what people are afraid of happening, but I hoped to enable critical thought on whether or not this was a justified fear or a fallacy. The switch back to normal sounds and the removal of the distorted backing track when the credits role means that the dystopian reality that people fear is only a creation of the mind. While gamification exists I do not think it will be able to trump the experience of the Flaneur. Both tell interesting stories about modern life and our crafted environments.

Alpert, A. (2010). Overcome by photography: camera Lucida in an international frame. Third Text, 24(3), 331-339.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Macmillan.

Explanation // Conclusion

Quantified Flaneur

 When moving through our urban space we tend to notice trends. We see patterns emerge in our rationalized surroundings, reflecting back the quantified nature of the city. I have concentrated on the juxtaposition of the organic movements of the flaneur and the regimented quantified approach of gamification. How can both exist when the other is present and do they interact? Using a thematic colour to create a ‘punctum’ as Barthes (1981) described them, a punctuation in my depiction of the city. “The punctum is a rupture, a discontinuation in the fabric of received knowledge .” The orange punctum to me represents the unnatural and stand out nature of gamification, the colour is a metaphor for the rationalisation and creation of social control in a public space. The rationalization that the flaneur was working against is  a constant battle,  gamified social control  is an environment centred on efficiency not simply existing in a space (deWinter, Kocurek, Kocurek, 2014). This fascinating pairing of the flaneur experience and gamification I believe shows two elements of modern life, often pitched against one another. Finding both in our day to day lives. I created hyperbolic representation of gamification to show what people are afraid of happening, but I hoped to enable critical thought on whether or not this was a justified fear or a fallacy. The switch back to normal sounds and the removal of the distorted backing track when the credits role means that the dystopian reality that people fear is only a creation of the mind. While gamification exists I do not think it will be able to trump the experience of the Flaneur. Both tell interesting stories about modern life and our crafted environments.

Alpert, A. (2010). Overcome by photography: camera Lucida in an international frame. Third Text, 24(3), 331-339.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Macmillan.

After deciding on my final collection of photographs, I began to think about how I could communicate my ideas more clearly through the addition of a soundtrack. I felt that a piece of music would not necessarily add anything to the collection in terms of emotion, and that i would rather use the soundtrack to guide the viewer through the concept of the collection.

Therefore I decided to piece together sound effects in order to tell a story, as if the sounds and images were the experience of the person walking down the street.

I used a steady footstep throughout the collection to place into the viewers mind the notion of a passerby walking down the street. The standard, everyday traffic and street noise then slowly turns into the sounds of protesters, as the passerby approaches the building, begins to take in their surroundings, and takes notice of the messages being communicated through this particular building.

As the collection comes to a close, the protests die down until there are only footsteps left, as the passerby continues on their journey, leaving the viewer to decide whether the passerby was affected by any of the messages they encountered. 

I feel as though the soundtrack was successful and added depth to the collection, in conjunction with the final haiku:

Here I have combined both the city soundscape and my sampled backing track (Freemusicarchive.org, 2015). Combined with editing to make them more ‘pixelated’ or ‘digitised’ I am hoping that the gradual transition to low-fi increasingly flat sounds indicates what I’m trying to say with the photographs, that gamification has become more and more present in our city as we attempt to rationalise everything. 

I was wanting my sound track to mimic the sensationalised approach to gamification and by extension people have to technology.