The various analyses of the urban space during the course quickly made it clear that our current movement through the city is mainly characterized by unawareness for our environment. Furthermore, most of the people moving through urban space are numbing themselves, are annoyed of the stress by the big crowds moving with them and are just interested on going from A to B without even recognizing where they have been and what surrounds them. The main problem that occured was that the urban population was finding it difficult to listen, whether to themselves, to other people or the environment itself.

The problem that had to be solved was helping the people start listening again and start being more aware of their surroundings. The project should help and provoke to be alone with own thoughts, bear a place of quietness in an overcrowded world and not looking all the time on the cell phone screen. Besides, this mindful experience was supposed to draw the attention of the user to an alternative place as an escape from his usual path through the city.

For these reasons the challenge was to tell the story as minimal as possible by underlining the value by involving as less tools as needed.

The answer was to combine data and audio to create a data-based audiofile which forced the user to listen carefully to get all the information about his surrounding but also puts him in an relaxing mood. Thus the listeners perspective on his day to day surrounding is shifted.

The user is moving in a linear way by the underground. He gets a sound file and an analogue map. The sound file contains the data which is based on the green urban space around the underground line.

The green spaces are categorized into graveyard, park and forest. Each category has its own sound.

graveyard = rain on a roof park = chirping birds forest = cracking branches

When the user passes a specific place the sound volume goes up or down to illustrate the proximity of the area. Besides that, the he gets an analogue map to have an overview over his location and the timeline of the audiotrack. He can pause the audio and leave the underground to explore the area with the information given.

Creating a map 1. At first the data for geovisulations had to be analyzed and stripped down to the excerpt that would be needed. 2. Exporting the data from the geoviz-programm to a PDF which then can be import into Illustrator. 3. The data is now transformed into vector shapes. 4. Now the map can be created and put into the right format.

Titelbild Eberhard Grossgasteiger

Geodaten http://download.geofabrik.de

Soundfiles Graveyard Forest Park Meditation Sound