CityBeat - "We believe that people are perceived a more holistic way."

Monday, 13 February 2012 07:52

Foto: Ieva Strale, Prosjekt: CityBeat

CityBeat is an installation project by Slovenian Mina Arko and Irish Ben Dromey from the Aalto University of Art and Design in Finland. The project has taken part in the EU-sponsored exhibition Public Technologies. City Beat, with support from the mobility module, visited Riga in November and December of 2011.

Text & interview: Bjorn Olstad

The Public Technologies exhibition was organized by the European Public Art Centre - EPAC, and involved 7 European countries, each contributing with one installation. The installations were first exhibited in their respective hometowns, but then switched places with one of the other participating countries. Mina Arko and Ben Dromey’s project was selected for Finland in an open application round.

"The CityBeat project is trying to connect people with their environment by making a form that you can touch. Usually we are not used to touch art, or touch anything in the city. So this work is actively encouraging people to touch it and to interact with it and to feel a heartbeat they are generating themselves, or that people in other European countries are generating with their noises, their traffic, with their cars, etc."

EPAC set certain limits for the installation, among other things, that it was contained to a glass cube. Arko and Dromey wanted to let people feel the heartbeat of their own, and other cities, and with the help of software and construction engineer Jari Suominen, they transformed the glass cube to a concrete box, where the sound of cities could be felt as movement and a sense of pulse.

The four walls of the cube were dedicated to four cities. With cell phones placed in the center of Helsinki, Riga, London and Madrid, they captured the sound of the cities, and the CityBeat audience could feel the four cities' pulse, a pulse that rise and falls with amount of traffic and public life in the urban centers.

 "So basically the idea is to make something that connects people to each other through this interface. It is a very abstract form, it is just a cube made of concrete, and the moment you touch it, you feel this organic beat, so there is a contrast between the organic function and the concrete material that we try to emphasise. And we try to make people aware that they are behind buildings, and that environments should not be as sterile as they are right now."

"There is another thing to it, when we walk through the city, we basically only use the sense of sight, we only use our eyes, our vision to move around in the environment. We are not really encouraged to use other senses. So our whole experience within the city becomes limited to this one sense. So we try to emphasise something else beside sight. This cube has no visual messages what so ever, so you really need to approach it and touch it to be able to feel the information. It is enabling you to use your other senses, and by that we believe that people are perceived a more holistic or human way."

After the exhibition period was over, the CityBeat was taken down, but the young artists hope to attend Ars Electronica with the project.

The project has received support from the module for Mobility support which is a part of The Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme

Read more about CityBeat on the project's pages, and on the CityBeat Diary.