2025 | 2:47 | Scans + Digital Animation
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, forgotten feces, rusty grates, and crumpled 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 emotional and 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—the textures, glitches, and scratches that breathe life into urban space. At even the smallest scale, the worn surfaces beneath our feet tell stories.
Using a portable scanner, this short experimental film is constructed entirely from scans of Toronto’s sidewalks, documenting the varied surfaces of different neighborhoods, capturing the particular textures. Each scan serves as a film frame, assembled into a moving reel. A film constructed entirely from the haptic and material essence of the sidewalk, designed to evoke an intimate, embodied response—allowing the viewer to experience the city not just visually, but through sensation.
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