Kevin Kelly

February 21, 2008

Inspired by a French sociologist from the last century, a fellow tracked his family’s movements in their TV room for hone hour. He turned his pattern of their locations into a striking info-graphic of the result which he posted on his Flickr account.

He says:

I got the idea from a French Sociologist [de Lauwe] who mapped the movements of one of his students for a whole year in Paris in the 50’s. He was shocked to see the narrowness of her existence and the 3x key points that she kept returning to.

Moon River explains:

This is a map by de Lauwe of all the movements made during one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher, illustrating, according to de Lauwe, the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives and which, according to Debord, ought to provoke outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited.

Back to the TV room. The contemporary surveyor, Bumblebee, conducting the monitoring process by manual labor. He says:

I used a marked-out equally-spaced grid in masking tape and filmed them moving via video across the grid for an hour. I then reviewed the video and plotted their movements on each minute of the video’s timecode onto a ‘room map’ with corresponsing grid.

The cat’s story is one of moving from heat source to heat source and then food. It starts at the heat source -radiator- behind the armchair and then moves over (right) towards the french window where the sun’s shining through. It then moves off towards it’s food outside of the room – for the diagram’s sake this shows it lingering by the door (contrary to the way it looks I didn’t lock them in) 🙂 I liked the little underlying micro narratives that you could take from the map – much like Denis Brown’s ‘Pumpkin Map’.