Urban Drifts is a series of research–driven bicycle rides through urban spaces that make use of the Situationist International concept of the dérive and tracks the course of the rides using GPS technology. At the outset, the goal of the project was to use the series of dérives as a probe and information gathering technique to create a set of photographic works and psychogeographic sound maps of cities I explored.

For the full project description, click here.

The reason for the project is my interest in exploring the connection between urban landscapes and the emotions and actions of the inhabitants of that urban space and looking to see what new insights technology (primarily GPS tracking) and psychogeographic maps can shed on this relationship.

For each dérive, I would choose an initial direction and then allow the local surroundings, such as the architecture, the sounds, the smells and the overall feel of the space to guide where I went next. I would drop my usual motives for movement and action (such as heading to school) and let myself “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters.”

To create the sound maps, I built a patch in Max MSP that applied the GPS data I collected during these rides to sound; making use of the latitude, longitude, elevation, speed, and duration, the midi output program I created expressed these many elements in successive tones. I considered my various latitude and longitude positions (or intersecting points) as chords, assigning a note to each value. The speed at which I was moving altered how quickly the notes (or chords of latitude/longitude) were played in succession, and the length of time I was in an area of space affects how long the notes were held.

Here are two video demonstrations of the dérives used in the application:

Here are samples of photos that were taken during this derive series:

For more information about this project, please check out the full description here.