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Concentrated Geographies is an exposition of video, photography, and installation work depicting ephemeral patterns of
movement through urban spaces. Regardless of final manifestation, each of the works began as video and was subsequently
subjected to multi-stage mediation culminating in the medium that best expressed the movement phenomena being conveyed.
The works compress small- to large-scale movement over extended periods of time into mediated representations—exposing
underlying, and often invisible, patterns and emergent behaviour.
Mediated and composited through custom Processing software or transparency overlay, the works range in content from
articulating the emergent behaviour of pedestrian crowds (Pulse Crowds) to illustrating the flow pattern of complex
multi-vehicular movement through a narrow corridor of space (One Kilometre, Two Minutes). Through this mediation
unique phenomena emerge, which are inherent to but not visible in the original raw video footage.
While the above works illustrate mass movement, individual form and experience are captured in the exhibition’s remaining
two works: The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of Torontonian, and Movement Portraits. The Impossibility of
Understanding, a video installation, depicts the experiences of three Torontonians occupying the city by focusing on the
elevations of the buildings through which pedestrians and vehicles navigate, never depicting the individuals themselves. The city
dwellers’ experiences of the present (represented in moving video) are eerily morphed into articulated memories of the past (via
a scrolling still image that extends 30 seconds back in time). In one such portrait, the gait of a pedestrian is formally pressed upon
the buildings she walks beside, causing the buildings’ representations to shift from rigid and rectilinear, to flowing and sinusoidal;
in another portrait a driver who comes to a stop causes adjacent buildings to streak as if smeared with a pallet knife. In Movement
Portraits, a series of composited photographs, time is also represented on the horizontal axis, causing static and slow moving
elements to smear, while rendering steadily moving pedestrians and cyclists as recognisable figures. In witnessing the patterns
that emerge from our movement within the fixed infrastructure of the urban environment, we become more aware of the manner
in which we occupy the city, and the ways in which its infrastructure impacts our occupation of it.
Concentrated Geographies emerges from a larger body of work exploring individual experiences of space and time, and our
relationship to elements of the city that are difficult to conceive of or understand due to their size, duration, or a combination of
the two.
Biography
Foster’s work is centred on emergent patterns of urban movement and architecture that are difficult to witness unless
re-articulated through mediation. Heavily process oriented, captured imagery is treated as data, subjected to a series of
actions, and re-presented to expose information inherent to, but not visible in, the original dataset. Foster has been featured
on the cover of Now, Xtra, and on MTV Canada, and has shown work in 15 countries worldwide.
WARC Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of our members, volunteers and the following funders: |
