Urban Sensographies: The Ignorant Camera
These works were created as part of the AHRC funded project Sensing the City, which ran from 2017 – 2020.
Urban Sensographies,
a book charting the work of the group of researchers who used arts and
humanities methods to create an embodied mapping of the urban space of
Coventry has just been published by Routledge. this book includes a
chapter entitled ‘The Ignorant Camera’ which describes my part of this
project.
Most of the video and sound outputs on this page were included in the exhibition Sensing the City: An Urban Room held at Herbert Museum and Gallery in January 2020. The catalogue for the exhibition can be found HERE.
Here are a set of films and sounds that I produced as part of this project:
Coventry Radiant City (Michael Lightborne, 2020)
A
feature-length film about the urban design and architecture of
Coventry, and the lived experience of dwelling in the city. A sensory
encounter with the legacy of city architect Donald Gibson, whose vision
drove the radical re-building of post-war Coventry.
RING ROAD RING (Michael Lightborne, Gruenrekorder, 2020)
A sonic investigation of the of the modernist megastructure that is the Coventry ring road. This
album features sound recordings of the low-level vibrations pulsing
through the modernist megastructure. To capture these sounds I used
contact microphones attached to the concrete pylons that support the
road, at various points around its circumference. I was immediately
surprised by how melancholy the ring-road sounds. For the Sensing the
City exhibition the turntable needle was stuck in a ‘locked groove’ at
the end of the record; an endless loop that keeps going around and around. Released on vinyl and digital by Gruenrekorder. Order the vinyl here and available in the UK via Juno here. You can listen to and purchase the digital version on Bandcamp here and below. Find out more about this aspect of the project here.
For a Road Can Be a Thing of Beauty
(Michael Lightborne, 2020)
A
two-screen film installation about the Coventry Ring Road and the
radical post-war re-design of the city. A car travels around the ring
road for a s long as it takes to read the entirety of The Future Coventry
pamphlet, published in 1945 to set out a grand vision for the
re-building of Coventry as a model modern city capable of accomodating
both motor car and pedestrian.
A Catalogue of the Great Buildings of Coventry (at great speed)
(Michael Lightborne, 2020)
A
drastically accelerated version of the above video installation,
offering a rapid travelogue of the surfaces and texture of the city.
Riffing on the history of abstract experimental film-making, this
psycho-geological portrait of the city explicitly references Stan
Brakage's Mothlight (1963).
@michael.lightborne© 2025 Michael Lightborne