Benedikt Groß

TRAJECTORIES – Printing the mobility landscapes of your city in wax

2016 Jun

Every day millions of people write spatial stories. Stories that only very few will ever be able to read. TRAJECTORIES is a media installation that can reveal these spatial stories, written by millions of city-dwellers wandering about their daily lives.

Taking the words of the cultural philosopher Michel de Certeau:“The networks of these moving intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representation, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”

TRAJECTORIES reveals the invisible traces of our everyday mobility. Real mobility data provided by our mobility app ‘moovel’ is automatically dripped on to an illuminated paper canvas. Printing the intersecting movements with melted wax creates a mobility narrative mapping these spatial stories over time.

The wax picture that is generated on canvas accumulates more and more lines and slowly unveils a panoptic view of the city. TRAJECTORIES uses a unique vantage point by pulling together the “arts of doing” of a mass of people searching for trips by using the moovel app.