http://https://youtu.be/3F2FmjVULWQ
Mobile City
When researching for the video I took a methodological approach from Debord and the Situationist International’s ideas around psychogeography and drifting as a way to explore and mentally map a city. This was important as I wanted to investigate the more human experience of seeing and navigating the city, especially the more phenomenological impact scale made in Hong Kong specifically. I also went through some of the Hong Kong Highway Department’s manual and historic reviews on programmes of highway maintenance and project aims, noting the consistent goals of connection and mobility aimed at vehicles and people. This need for constant motion and mobility, plus the ruminations on the human place in this pace and motion made me focus in on the sense of texture and route-making. This is what I bared in mind on initial location research, picking out public transport routes that allowed me to experience the multilevel flyovers both from the ‘vehicle point of view’ and later navigating on foot in an imagined quotidinal ‘commute’ through a neighbourhood of the city. I made note on the initial location scouting of positions to films from, good angles and particularly layered points of motion/transport, (e.g. spots with both lower road, elevated footpath, and flyover sandwiched together).
Once the locations and initial ideas were solidified, I made a rough storyboard, went on a second filming trip (and later ones to improve as much as I could on key shots I wanted). This solidification of idea included the mapping of graffiti and pipes. The illusion to a parallel of sorts in the construction and planning of Hong Kong’s flyovers especially had, throughout my research, brought to mind the links between a human urge to shape our environment. This coming through across the city in more deliberately planned and sanctioned urban planning and its layered personality in Hong Kong, and the more impulsive and subaltern mark-making of the urban artist in the covered walkways and side streets. All these human marks and archs made throught the city like notations of the human hand as a way to mark intended routes and make some space or motion of their own; whether that be to shape the city in an infrastructural level, weaving routes through static buildings the create a flow of traffic, the planning of pipes to direct flows of water, or the mark making of graffiti artists making their own gestures in space and time in the city at the scale they can manage.
Bibliography:
• De Certeau. M. [Translation, Rendall, S.] (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkely: University of California Press.
• O’Rourke, K. (2021) ‘Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City’. The MIT Press Reader. Available at: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/ [Accessed: 2/5/2023]
• Perec, G. [Translation, Lowenthal, M.] (2010) An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press.
UID= 3036000422
Elinor Russell
Your video essay explores mobility in the city and different infrastructural conditions that enable vehicular or human movement and gestures. You have some nice shots that depict footbridges and highways and their materiality or texture. Some more analysis or description of the infrastructural network and its significance on an urban scale would help solidify your ideas. Ambient noise or a simple narration would help keep the video engaging.