WALKING CINEMA: MUSEUM OF THE HIDDEN CITY is an interactive media project that explores the history of affordable housing from multiple perspectives. The upcoming interactive website and series of mobile-guided walking tours will take audiences deep into the lives and landscapes of four people who have completely different–but geographically overlapping–experiences of affordable housing in San Francisco. We found four San Franciscans who come from vastly different walks of life (and even time periods.) Literally walking in their shoes, small features in the cityscape unlock larger stories of injustice, city design, and incomplete experiments.
The walking tour will allow audiences to see the same place from different perspectives and challenge assumptions of “good design,” “upward mobility,” and “gentrification.” Audiences will dig into questions such as “Who was this place originally built for?” “Who is it designed for now?” “What direction is all of this going?”. The app uses Augmented Reality to layer plans, interior shots, and animations over your camera’s viewfinder, revealing the history, hidden spaces, and imagined futures of the Hidden City. Along the walking routes, the Museum of the Hidden City will include a variety of installations–such as the peephole cinema installation pictured below–that transport audiences back in time or into backstage areas of the story. These installations also create on-the-street awareness of the project and offer short codes to download the app.
