Traces – 'reading' the environment.

Abstract

This paper looks particularly at informal and implicit sources of information in our environment, how we can read this kind of information, and how the information has come about. The paper focuses on implicit information and ‘reading the environment’, with examples from practice, and presents an art project that investigates this notion through an interactive video installation. This installation, called ‘Traces’, presented interactive videos and photographs of two types of human-made traces, revealing past behaviours and/or intentions. It took, for instance, the skidmarks of cars on roads as input for a process of video manipulation and a recorded sonification.