movement@montlake

Brian Monwai

The pace of movement in contemporary urban life at times runs quickly, at other times slowly. We spend a lot of time hurrying from place to place -- whether by car, by bicycle, or on foot. Sometimes we find ourselves standing still against a backdrop of people rushing by.

The direction of movement can travel in parallel lines as in a freeway, in the overlapping, criss-crossing layers of an overpass, or in a randomly dissipating cloud like smoke from a smokestack. People – strangers and friends -- form an aggregate by coming together intentionally or unintentionally, with similar or dissimilar destinations when they depart. Signage may attempt to direct the flow of movement, but most of the everyday urban movement remains uncontrolled.

The Montlake area of Seattle is a hub of variegated patterns of movement. Bus riders, automobiles, gymnasts and their fans, and bicyclists are a sampling of agents in motion. Not shown are the myriad float-planes, automobile exhaust plumes, buses, crows, and joggers that form the dynamic texture of Montlake.

This project was also an experiment at methods of capturing a sense of movement with still pictures. Notes: while the panhandler and speed limit/your speed pictures were not taken at Montlake, they helped illustrate the nuances of urban movement. The pictures in the photo mosaic were also taken from the expanded Seattle area. The mosaic was assembled with AndreaMosaic software.




View Larger Map

No comments:

Post a Comment