Luisa Paraguai & Paulo Costa

INmobility: mobimesh

Abstract:
The INmobility project, a colaborative process between Luisa Paraguai and Paulo Costa, is concerned with perceptive narratives about everyday life in big cities. The proposal is to present experiences of drivers in the traffic, and syntactically materialize patterns of displacements. At this stage of the project, computing language articulates distinct databases to produce visual narratives, trying to map and monitor the activities – ways of seeing and perceiving the environment. The visual results recreate cityscapes, expanding and contracting the contours, through an exercise of different scales. People, during periods of traffic jam, extend the perception of the time, while they access databases remotely. In this context, the temporal dimension is considered the key element to deal with the city and its possible modes of occupation. The visual narrative is constructed from patterns, materializing possible modes of perception and spatial orientation. An algorithm [named MobMesh – co-authored with Paulo Costa and Luisa Paraguai], written in processing, updates daily routines and proposes visualities not predictable through processes of encoding and decoding; mathematical relationships and iteration processes divide photos in vertical slices and reorganize them using parameters – the car speeds. The interface presents two parts interconnected by computing language. The top features the image compositions, while the bottom presents graphs or triangulations resulting from real-time analysis (tracking) of the images flow, obtained by urban webcams. The two dynamic modes of visualization are simultaneous and formalize instantaneous states of flows, understood as physical mobility (displacements in space and time) and informational density (data accessed remotely). The proposal is to recreate the urban landscapes, expanded and contracted by manipulating scales and perceptions. It is important to research the visual language aesthetic and symbolically as poetic articulation mediated by the computational text.

Biography:
Luisa Paraguai Artist, Researcher and Faculty Member at PhD and Master Design Program – Anhembi Morumbi University. Post-doc at M-Node Planetary Collegium, Italy. Master and PhD degree at Multimedia Department – Unicamp. Ad Hoc Consultant at CAPES. Reviewer at Leonardo Digital Review, The MIT Press. Paulo Costa Artist and Master degree at Multimedia Department – Unicamp, Bachelor of Fine Arts – Unicamp, and of Systems Analysis – PUC-Campinas. Teacher at Digital and Game Design – Anhembi Morumbi University. Recent participation in Constelações – SESC 2002, FILE 2007(BR) and GLI.TC/H 2011 (US)(NL)(UK).