Alternative Souvenir 'The City Heartbeat'
‘The City Heartbeat’ is a series of sound postcards which is aimed to show us unusual alternative London – real London. Each postcard is a combination of sound and critical image which captures the movement of contemporary London. It is combination of ugly exhausting noise and immaculate beauty of rapid movement towards our future. Each object from a series has a standard A6 size when it’s folded, includes 2 images (front and back cover) and has a recorded sound in between. When you open a postcard is starts to play the noise of London streets, recorded in pictured areas during a rush hour. Front cover is a solid colour illustration of London skyline in most popular touristic destinations, but from unusual for traditional souvenirs perspective. Every selected area is a highly modernised part of the city with a strong historical background. Illustration pictures a clash of few different centuries and highlights the dramatic contrast of society values, political views and architecture.
Back cover is very minimal. It has only the image of a music noise recorded in a particular part of London. It is vectorised image from the software for editing the sound and has an exactly the same colour as a front cover. When postcard is unfolded you can see that music noise looks exactly as a city but in a smaller scale. Sound becomes a miniature model of the city – souvenir. The front cover image is constructed from straight vertical lines referring to the back cover. The whole image is like a constant movement without the beginning and the end.
