2026 | 2:50 | Scans + Digital Animation
Miles of Toronto sidewalks—captured one pass at a time with a portable paper scanner.
A sidewalk is more than just a route from point A to B—it’s a reflection of a city’s culture, a marker of neighborhood wealth, community, and civic engagement (or lack thereof). It is a collective creation, a living collage scattered with old bubblegum, lost movie tickets, rusty grates, feces, and hotdog wrappers. Yet, in our modern metropolises, governments have rushed to sanitize this essential public space. In their place, hostile architecture emerges—an unfeeling machine, devoid of human affect. But why does it feel this way? Where does affect lie? And can we visualize something as sensorial as texture itself? Drawing from urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and Juhani Pallasmaa, alongside film scholar Laura Marks, I explore the haptics of the city that breathe life into urban space. Using a portable scanner, Sidewalk 3000 is a short experimental film constructed entirely from scans of Toronto’s sidewalks, documenting the textures and sounds of different neighborhoods. Each scan serves as a film frame, assembled into a moving reel. A film constructed entirely from the haptic, allowing the viewer to experience the city not just visually, but through sensation.
Sidewalk 3000 is distributed by the Winnipeg Film Group.
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