Commuter Lungs

This could be either a large-scale community art project or, if the cheapest route is preferable, some educated guesswork that results in a temporarily diverting animated gif. I’ll describe the former.

Select a geographical area that includes a range of man-made environments such as a grouping of a city, and the mixed dormitory and rural settlements around it. Give everyone – or at least a cross section representative of everyone – a gps tracker or similar. Persuade them to carry the gps tracker with them all day, every day, for a small number of days. Collect all the location information over this period of days and use it to plot a map of the comings and goings of these thousands of individuals.

Each carrier is assigned a point of light and, over a single-shaded map of the area, the data, once processed, should reveal amongst a myriad of hypnotic patterns, the paths of the commuters, from dormitory to CBD and back again, like blood through a heart, the static stars of those who died during the period and the circumscribed school and shopping runs of the suburban mothers.