The digital dérive generator is composed of six months worth of daily walking and photographing. There are roughly 30,000 images in the archive, shot at the rate of about 200 a day. During different phases of the project I organized (or dis-organized) my walks based on different methadologies. Towards the beginning of the project I developed methods for determining random routes. I also experimented with more intuitive and chance-driven techniques. Some of the walks were designed by transposing a shape, another geographic area, or other data overtop the Philadelphia or New York maps I was working from.
The area of examination utilized in this project is a predominantly linear pattern from New York City and Brooklyn down to South Philly, with a large concentration of imagery coming from the suburbs directly in between both metropolitan areas.
Through discussion with Martin Murray, a system of organization and presentation for this archive was developed, which resulted in the "digital dérive generator. All 30,000 images were catalogued based on two properties. Rather than assign a discrete, binary value however, each image's properties can vary anywhere between the two extremes. The axes in question were:
- X Axis
- Centrality<------->Peripherality
- Y Axis
- Openness<------->Closedness
When starting the system, a random sampling of images is plotted on the screen. Each image is positioned based on the XY coordinates mentioned above. Clicking on any image will resort the images and present a new screen, composed of a mixture of random images and other images numerically near to the one selected. In this way, a number of mouse clicks results in an electro-metaphoric walking experience. This action is similar to the conception of hyperlinks and virtual movement that defines the organization of the world wide web, but normalizes the system on actual rather than virtual movement.
NOTE: Due to odd implementation problems, the initial screen will appear blank; Please scroll down to the bottom-righthand corner to begin.