ABSTRACT
This chapter argues, following Patrick Keiller, for the value of film-making and sound recording as modes of spatial critique. It presents an array of films and sound recordings produced during the three-year Sensing the City research project as fragments of a malfunctioning 21st-century panorama, an attempt to articulate the whole complex equation of the city at once, whilst also imaging the ‘incompleteness’ of everyday urban experience. It highlights the key theoretical and practical sources of strategies that were adopted in the making of the films and sound works and moves through a number of cinematic and conceptual devices, connected according to the structural-aesthetic principle of montage.
The chapter advocates for the use of technologies of video and sound recording as instruments of primary research, as opposed to functioning primarily as tools for the popular dissemination of research undertaken using more conventional and legitimate means. The camera and the microphone function here as sense instruments, extensions of a human-subjective sense apparatus deployed in order to investigate, analyse and map the urban space of Coventry according to its visual aesthetics, intangible atmospheres, psychic force-fields, audible and inaudible soundscapes, moods and tones. The chapter offers a set of principles for a sensate panoramic film-making practice, accompanied by an array of case-study films that constitute some potential ‘iterations’ of a manifold palette of strategies.
