The Street presents the author’s attentive observation of his surroundings, intertwined with continuous reflection — on what exists, and what might have been if things were otherwise. It resembles the perspective of someone encountering this district, or perhaps human society itself, for the very first time. He documents and examines the rules that govern daily life, attempting to understand why they exist at all. What he writes is deliberately mundane, describing ordinary, even uninteresting phenomena, while speculating modestly on their hidden causes.
In my own project, I follow a similar approach of persistent documentation and questioning to investigate the lives of residents living on boats. Rather than constructing predetermined conclusions, I establish only a loose framework for interviews, allowing narratives to emerge through dialogue and observation. I believe this inquiry ultimately points to how the constraints and pressures of urban space shape individual choices. These residents are often romanticized by mainstream narratives as living a lifestyle detached from the community, yet at the same time, they have become a new spectacle within the urban landscape.
Similarly, Infrastructural Tourism investigates the invisible systems that sustain urban existence—satellite transmission, wireless networks, drainage systems—revealing the ghostly traces of power and maintenance embedded within the city. Through the study of signs, vague markings, traces of activity, and official representations, it renders the unseen perceptible. This contradiction—between the distant and the intimate, the abstract and the material, the imaginary and the real—forms the essence of infrastructural awareness. Urban systems, landscapes, and objects are interdependent, shaping both the tangible and the immaterial flows of contemporary life.
Drawing from this perspective, my project focuses on the boats’ physical details—the coverings on their windows, the arrangement of personal belongings, and the assemblage of structural materials that together compose their fragile architecture. These textures and configurations become clues to imagine the residents’ personalities and attitudes toward life: their negotiations between privacy and exposure, improvisation and permanence. Through further interviews, I discovered the subtle contradictions embedded in this lifestyle: systemic housing inequality reconfigured as a personal choice, and the emergence of a “grey zone” between regulation and autonomy. Within this ambiguous space, residents navigate between settlement and movement, belonging and exclusion, visibility and invisibility.
By combining field observation, speculative interpretation, and interactive visual design using TouchDesigner, the work constructs an atmosphere that feels dreamlike and romantic yet remains elusive and unreachable. It is not a documentary nor a critique in the conventional sense, but rather a spatial and sensory inquiry into how urban systems aestheticize constraint—how the infrastructures of necessity are transformed into images of freedom.
Reference
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