UNITE
T1 / 24
49.265898683400955, -123.251743608119557
A1 - Home Ground
A2 - Cube Method
A3 - Supernatural • nitobe • šxʷsyiçəm (spanish banks)
A4 - Buchanan Rain
A5/A6 - Lost in Translation
We are tasked with observing and recording a familiar space at multiple scales. The objective is to explore how social, cultural, and environmental phenomena shape spatial perceptions. We are to create a 1:100 site plan of their home, a 1:500 neighbourhood map, and a city diagram, using both analog and digital drawing methods to convey unique spatial attributes.
Learning Expectations
Develop observational and drawing skills at various scales.
Understand how social, cultural, and environmental factors influence spatial perceptions.
Enhance visual communication through site plans, maps, and diagrams
Process / Intention
For my familiar space I have chosen to use my neighbourhood and the lens to be that of the crow. A bird that I see many times per day, a mover in space that travels more than any other social creature that I know.
As we crawl through the citynoise, they are almost invisble. This avian darkness moves on, above, and beyond the concrete, charting ephemeral maps with their daily rituals. In their flight patterns are lessons on adaptation, belonging, and transcience of space. Unlike static cartography, a crows path is redrawn by the second, responsive to forces of nature and urbanism. Reincorporated.
Every day, thousands journey 15-20km with the sun. In the winter the fleet reaches 10,000. 10,000 crows performing close to 10,000 beats with their wings at sunrise, and ten thousand more at sunset, toward their roosting grounds on Still Creek Drive.
As Jake Chakasim shares in “The Trickster and the Tell-Tale Signs of Wreckonciliation”, Considering the similarities between humans and ravens: we are both highly social species, living mainly in small family groups (clans) but assembling in much larger numbers (tribal affiliation) around rich resources. We are both intelligent and adapt relatively easily to changes in environmental conditions. But we are also “generalists with a speciality” (Friedmann 1996), opportunists about knowledge and power, and can exploit a huge variety of resources.
So, here are my attempts to draw these patterns where I hope to notice what was previously not noticeable and experience my familiar spaces in new and perhaps even profound ways. To reframe what I understand of urban design and planning as fluid as a feather in flight.
To visually map the day-to-night migration patterns of urban crows across Vancouver using a simulation prototype.
Algorithmic simulation of crow movements superimposed on a Vancouver map, enhanced with colour inversions in Final Cut Pro to depict transitions from daylight to nighttime.
This prototype serves as a base study of the interactions between urban wildlife and city environments, providing insights into behavioural patterns and potential impacts on urban planning.
In that light, the crows connect with the life in-between, in those liminal spaces from the tiny rock on the beach to a skyscraper. They map that space, and share it among one another.
In 1907, Julius Neubronner invented a miniature pigeon camera with the purpose of aerial photography. The pigeons were released from various locations, and as they flew back to their home, they would capture a series of photographs, as early forms of surveillance and mapping.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-turn-of-the-century-pigeons-that-photographed-earth-from-above
Crows are featured as significant figures in mythology, often portrayed as tricksters or messengers between the spiritual and physical worlds. Such story can be found among the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe, which involves a figure known as “Old Man Coyote” who often interacts with crows in their tales, and crows take position of an observer or a narrator.
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/eadweard-muybridge-animal-locomotion