The study of the British scientist deals with a new understanding of time and space, derived from the rise of digital data. Thrift notes that new media technologies have a significant impact on the perception. Moreover, movement is created by a continuous influx of calculated data. According to Thrift, the digital rationalization of real circumstances enriches rather than simplify reality. In fact, there are new ways created to gain insight in the world. In her study
Mobile Screens, The Visual Regime of Navigation Nanna Verhoeff stresses the importance of mobile screens, which allows a new experience of the environment, including the whole body in the process of making space. Indeed, mobile screens offer a fundamentally different observation, as one has no longer a fixed point of registration, but instead a mobile element, carried by the user. In this way, the smartphone becomes a display that registers movement, in which every sensor notices and stores specific data. Through this, the spatial environment is been defined in a new way.
The Flanograph incorporates the ideas of Nigel Thrift and Nanna Verhoeff in a new architectural technological concept. Thrift makes it clear that in the light of technological developments, new elements of calculation, which he calls
qualculation, can be developed, in which each entity can be incorporated into an overall architecture of positioning. Measurability is a dynamic concept. Calculations have become operational in a natural order of things. On the other hand Verhoeff puts an emphasis on
performative cartography, drawn from the kinetic properties of the move within the geographical and social fabric. For Verhoeff no longer the camera, but the overall concept of the smartphone, including display and software, forms the window on the world, along with the interaction between device and user and the pathways that are being made. By combining these elements, the Flanograph becomes a choreographic narrative measuring-system, consisting of a sequence of registrations.
HyperUrbain.4 is an initiative of CITU-Paragraphe (University of Paris) and the Laboratoire DeVisu (Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut Cambrésis).
More info: HyperUrbain.4 – program