experience of space through movement

or a change in perspective from a bike.


i've been wanting to write a post for ages about how awesome it is to have a bike. and then during the week, i was asked to participate in a project which looks at space and perception. and, because my bicycle is so much fun, a lot of the experience of my environment happens at about 25 clicks.

it's this moving mode of perception that has been slowly infiltrating my thinking at the moment. a while back, when the studio were down at the docklands, we had to do site analysis of the place, which investigated the anomalies of the development, entitled Cracks In The Spectacle [personally i think the whole thing is an anomaly, but hey]. I produced a low-res video work which mapped an area via bike, considering that there is no way to ride around docklands and hardly any bikes (especially compared to the rest of bike city).



I also made a sound work, tracking the soundscape of the landscape, including a guy playing a harmonica.

But back to the bike.

there's something about using a bike to track places, or develop your own personal geography, which traverses the scale between architectural and human, between public and private. when i'm riding through the amazing melbourne streets, i feel a sense of ownership about my neighbourhood. pride even. and definitely joy. and add tunes in the phones to that mix and i regularly get to feel like i'm a movie or film clip, with my own private soundtrack! i never feel like that walking. or driving.

aside from the obvious environmental joys of being a cyclist, i think this phenomenological and psychogeographical aspect of bike transport is rarely discussed and i'd be interested in finding out what the big guns (berger, bachelard, baudrillard) say about movement and perception.

i think i might start making some more bike videos, like a mixture between will self's psychogeography and david byrne's bike ride to manhattan.