Sessions | Talks
11:45 - 12:00 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
A place is not just its coordinates. It is the waft of petrichor, the sonic shifts of a street, the wear and tear of walls that have witnessed decades. Atlas of Intangibles is a data experience built from score-based walks, making the sensory legible through images, audio, and interconnected views.
Priti Pandurangan
Information Experience Designer
We know a place through our senses before we know it through any map. The waft of petrichor after rain. Bird songs in the background. The sound of traffic, the rhythm of footfalls, the marks left on walls by time and human activity. These fleeting encounters are the actual fabric of a place, and traditional cartography has no vocabulary for any of them.
Atlas of Intangibles is Priti's attempt to build that vocabulary.
The project begins on foot. Using score-based data walks, Priti collects sensory data through two lenses: Witness Marks, observations of wear, weathering, and the signs cities accumulate over time, and Sonic Shifts, the dynamic, layered soundscape of urban life. Each data point is rich in context, pairing field notes and sketches with photography, audio recordings, and video. The digital experience built from this data invites viewers to choose themes and explore the collected observations as three distinct views: journeys through the walk, connections between related data points, and typologies across the gathered material. The work asks what it looks like to preserve ambiguity and affect in a data experience rather than resolve them into a clean layer on a map.
To extend the experience into the physical, Priti built a tangible interface: a set of cards, each embodying a specific recollection, that navigate the viewer to its associated data and connections when tapped on a reader. A keepsake box, not a database.
This talk walks through the full process behind the work, examining alternate forms of data collection, the iterative design decisions, and the thinking behind data experiences that encourage a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.
Priti is a creative practitioner working globally across digital humanities, data, and computational futures through research, facilitation, and critical inquiry. Her personal practice explores pluralistic approaches to data and technology, focusing on forms of knowledge and epistemologies that resist quantification while holding space for lived experience, ambiguity, and affect.
She is also a data walker and facilitates data walks in cities around the world, enabling participants to engage with urban environments through situated and embodied interpretations.
Central to her work is how culture is held, transmitted, and reconfigured across contexts and temporalities, and the structures through which it is preserved and interpreted.