Fastforward_Rewind_Repeat

When looking back on my first walk through Barcelona’s Barri Gotic, the constant shifting and pulsing of winding, small, dim spaces and grand, light-filled spaces is what most prominently flickered in the back of my mind like a fast-forwarded movie of intense light and shadow. Intense and exciting is certainly a way to describe the spatial experience that the Barri Gotic offers. I cannot think of any place I’ve been where the simple act of walking from street to square and back to a street could be so powerful. I quickly decided that I wanted to try and document this unique experience. Most importantly, I wanted to record the amount of light within the space because to me it was the biggest varying factor from street-to-street, or plaza-to-plaza. Capturing video of a short walk through the area and pulling still frames, I then put those frames together in order to create a scale/bar-coding type of timeline. My attempt was to map the Barri Gotic’s rapidly fluctuating scale and variety of space with its equally diverse behavior of light within those spaces. In the end, the darker segments on the video produced “scale” represented the smallest spaces and vice versa. By reducing the documentation of my walk down to the experience’s basic tonal qualities, I was able to translate that pulsating image of light and shadow (that I remember so vividly from my first Barri Gotic encounter) into a more legible form.