City - Beijing

City - Beijing enters the city through experience: atmosphere, bodily sensation, movement, changing conditions and unstable perception.

The work suggests that a city is made not only of streets, buildings and recognisable views, but also of invisible and shifting elements—light, humidity, temperature, spatial pressure, bodily orientation and the passing intensity of human presence.

What appears on screen is not simply a recorded view of Beijing. It is Beijing as a lived and changing sensory field. The city is continuously re-formed through moving image, sound and interaction.

No city is experienced in only one way.

The city changes according to where the body stands, how it moves, what it senses, what it remembers and what kind of atmosphere surrounds it. In City - Beijing, this variability becomes part of the work’s structure. A small shift in gesture, light or environmental condition can alter the relation between moving image and sound, making each realisation potentially different.

Interaction makes visible a deeper proposition: the city is always partially produced through the way we inhabit it. The work presents Beijing as something that appears differently through changing bodies, changing conditions and changing acts of attention.

The work combines DV footage, real-time sound and environmental sensing into a single expressive system.

Its moving images carry the visible surface of the city—structures, movement and urban situations—while its sound opens another layer: tension, density, instability, internal pressure, atmosphere and transformation. Between them lie the less visible dimensions of urban experience: humidity, heat, light, physical presence and gesture.

Temperature and humidity enter the work materially. Gesture and bodily movement do the same. The city therefore emerges as something sensed and modulated through multiple channels at once.

The result is an audiovisual language that is immediate yet difficult to translate fully into words: physical, spatial and atmospheric, while carrying a strong inner tension and a clearly organised visual and musical structure.

DV moving images of Beijing are brought into a real-time visual system built in Max/MSP/Jitter. Sound is generated and shaped live through Csound and MSP.

Light, temperature and humidity sensors, together with Kinect-based gesture capture, provide input that affects the behaviour of the video and sound systems. Environmental data and bodily movement enter the computational system, where they influence timing, transformation, visual behaviour and sonic development.

The work operates as a linked audiovisual environment rather than as a fixed video with a fixed soundtrack. Moving image and sound are organised as interdependent layers within one continuously shifting structure.

The audience encounters a system in which city, body, atmosphere and audiovisual result remain in live relation. This relation gives the work its pressure, immediacy and capacity for transformation.

City - Beijing places the relation between the human body and contemporary urban space at the centre of the work.

The city becomes a field of conditions that enters the body and is also altered by the body’s presence, movement and attention. Light, temperature, humidity, gesture and spatial experience all participate in how the city is perceived and re-imagined.

Moving image, sensor-based interaction and real-time sound function here as parts of one expressive language. They articulate a shared condition of living inside an urban environment that is material and unstable, visible and invisible, external and intimate.

The work offers an intensified experience of being in relation with the city—through perception, atmosphere, movement and the continuously shifting boundary between what can be measured and what can only be felt.