'Pathways' to someplace else: mediating the sensory experience of urban landscapes

This talk shares a series of practice-as-research projects that investigate the use of audiovisual media to document and mediate sensorial experiences of urban infrastructure. The work sits at an intersection of performing arts, cultural heritage and sustainability and aims to centre the sensuous body in conversations around urban design and regeneration. The work draws on somatic movement practice and incorporates 3D scanning, 360 video and other media to document performance walks along roadways. The core project used as a case study is 'Pathways: the Futurity of the Pedestrian in Malta', which places the performer at a recently developed
highway system, the Marsa Junction in Malta. This project evokes 'the sensorial pedestrian' as a tool for awakening practices for sustainable urban living.

The talk situates the work within contexts of interdisciplinary arts practices that use digital media to 'immerse' audiences in real-world built environments and how the space may be occupied by onscreen performers and the audience. We discuss the methodologies and aesthetic considerations involved in the context of collaboration between a dancer and a digital artist. In particular, we explore the technological affordances of consumer technologies for low-cost audiovisual production that
might make such collaborations more widely accessible.

We share this methodology as a provocation for other practitioners to consider interdisciplinary collaboration between somatic movement practitioners and digital producers to explore ways in which to engage somatic investigation within the design of immersive mediations of bodies and landscapes, and ultimately ignite conversations about contemporary infrastructure and its effect on interconnected
forms of living.