Routes+Routines Recyclart

4 R+R walks in the center of Brussels. Starting from Recyclart, 4 x 10 participants followed a walk along different aspects of camera surveillance.

Description on page Recyclart: http://www.recyclart.be/content/view/14269/1/lang,fr/

ingredients of the walk:

– radio controlled car fitted with small camera, mimicking the Lunar Rover
– balloons fitted with small camera, mimicking Google satelite
– capture wireless surveillance video, tv, and other 2.4ghz video signals
– visit Parking Panorama, discuss panorama painting and 360 degrees camera’s
– show ‘the making of’ video about ‘A street with a view’
– distribute Ambient tv’s ‘CCTV Filmmakers Manifesto’

Download the PDF of the handout given to the participants.

All images can be found on the CONSTANT Gallery
A choice:


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Balearic walk 1

Balearic Routes + Routines proposed a group action in the center of Palma on 18 october 2008. Departing from the hectic Plaça Major, we walked with 10 people through the shopping center, scanning electro magnetic fields, sniffing video surveillance and wifi TV, amplifying distorted sounds from the souls of our feet, filming with camera equiped shoe’s, and more nifty out of the ordinary ways of capturing data produced by walking.

Here’s a video capturing some of the highlights of the day. (Ogg/theora, 20 mb)


Here’s another one, with snapshots taken from the rotating mirrors shoe.
(Avi, 700k)

(Video doesn’t play in browser? Install VLC, right-click, save file, open in VLC)

Balearic Routes + Routines takes place in the framwork of the Majorcan media festival PING!, taking place in cultural center Sa Taronja in Andratx.

Scripts for easy deplacements

In the framework of the Open Source Architecture module of the KHLIM Genk Media design course, students followed a workshop around the soon to be redeveloped train station of Hasselt. Loosely based on the work of the delicious Francis Alys, many elegant situationist performances, the exquisite Sophie Calle and lets not forget the delightful Christopher Nolan, I prepared three short exercises.

1: Walking in someone elses footsteps

While walking through the station you are listening to a recording of a walk through a park. (Download here; mp3, 12mb ) The paste of the walk you are hearing is steady and unbroken. Play the sound loud, step into the rhythm, and don’t stop until the file ends. Your paste is influenced several factors: are you walking alone or in a dense crowd? What surface are you walking on, how is the infrastructure, roads, traffic, buildings? What shoes are you wearing … and let’s not forget: your body. The length of your legs, do they match the ones of the original walker, can you keep up with him? what is your physical condition? Fit enough to transpose a walk through the park to a busy railway station?

download ogg/theora movie 4.8 mb
(Video doesn’t play in browser? Install VLC, right-click, save file, open in VLC)

2: Identify with others
Copy behavior of people you meet in the street. Select the people you follow by a feature they have in common. For example: follow only people with red shoes. Of every person you meet wearing red shoes, you imitate, copy, and embody one specific gesture or movement. Be like a sponge, add them up, incorporate them in your walk. Make small loops: repeat the movements, improvise and construct coherent movements out of the collaged gestures, behaviors and moves. Your final character looks nothing like the original people you imitated. You have created a new, extravagant persona, acting extraordinary, and very probably not wearing red shoes.

download ogg/theora movie 5 mb
(Video doesn’t play in browser? Install VLC, right-click, save file, open in VLC)

3 Follow blind
Walk in teams of two. One person is leading the other following with closed eyes. You don’t speak. The person leading guides the follower with th sound of him / her footsteps. In a silent place: step gentle, in a place bursting with sounds: stamp like a madman, kick against dustbins, make a noise. Experiment with speeds, proximity to passers by, smell and disorienting elements.

Smiling protest


There is no category old news on this blog, but this image would definitely qualify: found stuck in between pages of a two year old agenda.
Depicted is a loose protest in Mexico -city against the outcome of the elections in august 2006, supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador demanded a re-counting of the votes. They surrounded three big foreign banks, claiming that they “ransack the country” and “widen the barrier between rich and poor” and because, supposedly, these banks had participated in the politics of the country supporting the PAN candidate Felipe Calderón. The protestors put up banners with the text ‘Smile!’

Taxi walk

Pictures from a rainy but beautiful exploration celebrating Laïa’s birthday, chasing the remaining traces of railroad tracks on the huge site of Thurn and Taxis in Brussels. The site is since a few years under construction, the main buildings of this former deposit and transition site have been converted to offices, conference and exhibition halls, the backland is still terrain vague. The ruins of service houses on the site are under water, the site has been heightened with a meter of new sand resulting in a bad drainage and huge mud pools. On our walk we found several looted bags, empty wallets, bankcards, a drivers license. There are three viaducts crossing the lot, you can enter into one of the pillars: it contains a huge vacant space, probably a former storage or workspace related to the railway activities.

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Here you can find more images

Workshop City Browsing

Link to images produced by Gable and the mirror shoe during the workshop of January 10, Apt
Pictures

Link to movies produced by Gable and the mirror shoe during the workshop of January 10, Apt
Movies

Link to documentary movies produced by Peter during the workshop of January 10, Apt
Movies

Link to snapshots of the workshop, January 10 + January 11
Snapshots

Link to all soundfiles on archive.org
Audiofiles

How to install Free Software on your Macintosh
Manual