You’re walking over a bridge at night and to your right, down below on the water, a huge word in white light is forming. Then a sentence. Then a stanza of poetry. Were you to walk on that bridge again on a different night in different conditions, that poem would be different. Walk on a different bridge you’d get very different poetry.
But have you looked to your left?
On your left is poetry in another language – a language a neighbour or a fellow walker of yours is likely to know.
But there’s more still. Have you looked closely over the bridge and directly down?
There you’d see how much electricity the people walking on the bridge are creating, what datasets are affecting the poetry you’re reading, and an epithet ‘You are electric. Come #FindYourFeet’.
Throughout the life of the piece your relationship with it can build, you can affect it more and more, or simply enjoy how others do whenever you encounter it.
In Beneath our feet, the stars, the energy of your feet is captured by pressure pads on a bridge over the water and is translated into beautiful poetry. The quietly emerging lines of poetry are generated in response to contextual data such as the time of day, the weather and how many people are crossing the bridge with you now. Beneath our feet, the stars enables you to play with the city simply by being in it. This is a subtle, human approach to technology unlocking the creative power of the citizen amidst the architecture of our future cities.