Metropolitan Views is a scientific as well as an art project that aims to develop a mobile application for smartphones, a FlanoGraph, that, by recording data stored on smartphones or other data carriers, records a number of movement patterns (digital tracks). Specific, the project aims to capture – in a playful, but critical way – the virtual structure of cities, using data collected with a smartphone, provided with customized software for navigation and sensors for the measurement of speed, light, temperature, sound and heart rate.

The Flanograph

The FlanoGraph is a mobile application for smartphones, based on augmented reality and sensor technologies, which captures, stores and reproduces patterns of movement – digital tracks – by registering a number of sensor data. Hereby, the urban environment is not only perceived through the eye of the camera, but by the embedded sensors of the smartphone that record a wide range of physical and social processes – including sound, luminosity, temperature, speed, breathing, heartbeat. These processes are analyzed and converted into visual narratives. In this vision the smartphone is transformed into a measurement-tool. Measurability is conceived as a dynamic concept. Calculations have become operational in a natural order of things. The FlanoGraph is as much a tool for capturing and analyzing data, as a visualizing and editing tool.

The aim is to generate new perceptions of spatiality, drawn from the kinetic properties of the movement within the geographical and social fabric. For the interaction, the FlanoGraph works on the HUD (Head-Up display) principle, which coordinates the gestures for accessing and using the key features of the application. The intention of the project is to confront the user, in situ – from his daily experience – with a changing situation of the urban experience and its possible implications for the behaviour, but also to scan this environment for values and norms: involving him as a participant in the phenomenon.