territórios 23º34' s 46º39' w

territórios 23°34' S 46°39' W

documentation

site specific urban installation-intervention - thematizing the complexity around the Paulista Avenue.

The Paulista Avenue represents the second economic center (knot) ofthe city of São Paulo, in which the downtown is still the first important financial sector and Berrini avenue the third. The region between Paulista Av. and Berrini Av hosts the administrative headquarter offices of 46% of the Brazilian national GNP, more specifically in the quarters: Vila Madalena, Lapa, Pinheiros, Itaim, Jardins, Paulista, Moema and Campo Belo. The urban infra-structure presents 22 heliports, 40 telecommunication antennas, the flux of 1.5 million people, 100 thousand vehicles and 100 helicopter takeoffs per day.

Guido Carlo Argan quotes Sausurre on his book "Art History as the History of Cities": there are no cities but "urban situations". Therefore, São Paulo consists of a complex of urban situations resulting articulated networks linking multi scenic urban territories.

"territories 23°34's 46°39' w took place at the white cubic room as well as on the glass façade of the Art Gallery of SESC Paulista.

The region was mapped out with a GPS device and a video camera, not casting aside the interferences of these capture systems and from the environment.

The approaching processes to these new cartographies are achieved through the new electronic devices, using as key components the mapping, the collect and analysis of this information. It is from the analysis that the measuring and indexation mechanisms generate a data bank to build complex systems of visualization, according to strategies for specific readings needs. In this sense, the habitant or user of large cities are confronted at the begin of the third millennium with the concept of "local" in line with the multiple dynamics of the flux made up from contemporaneous articulations between: global and local, macro and micro. Furthermore, dynamics stimulated by the invasion of stock markets, speculations and the implementation of large scale systems of telecommunication and transport, all under the paradigm of new technologies.

Based on the collected data, the items were transformed in audiovisual elements controlled by infrared sensors, related to the flux of people in the interior of the gallery. These images were projected on the external glass façade of the gallery giving back to the urban space aesthetic constructions of its own complexity. At the same time, these images were a deconstruction of the concept of a city "on the post card".

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The glass transparency of the façade was used as a hybrid skin between the city and the gallery, creating a polyphonic, mixed, fragmented city, in which the observer was asked to move in the space in order to have a larger visualization of the project.

from the middle of the avenue: it was possible to see on the glass façade the overlapping of two projected images inserted to the urban surroundings including the shadows of the visitor in the interior of the gallery.

from the sidewalk: it was possible to see different fragments of the images on the glass façade. Always another depending on the position of the pedestrian.

the white cube: in the interior of the exhibition space, the projections on the glass façade were blended with the back light images from the city fluxes.

from the inside of the white cube: the interpretation of the "geo localization" of the gallery arose from the "Global Positioning System", which received in real time the information from a GPS device installed and fixed locally.

All possible variables that the device offers were used: longitude, latitude, altitude, quantity of visible satellites, oscillations and surrounding atmospheric interferences. GPS interpreted all this information as movements although the device had always been in repose.

The real time GPS processing were projected on the wall in the back wall of the gallery through over a digital sculpture created from the multiple 3D mappings based on the various GPS tracks from the Paulista Avenue. An ultrasound sensor was the controlling interface to measure the distance between the public and the projected image. This sensor visited layer by layer of information grab from the GPS fixed on the glass of the gallery and sent to the system via Bluetooth.