parkour ; technologies of vision ; urban cinematics ; urban landscape ; visual culture ; visual production

Summary

A provocation: move from point A to point B in as straight a line as possible, reconfiguring your body as necessary. Parkour is a movement practice and discipline that involves running, jumping, vaulting, swinging, and flipping around, across, and through obstacles as they are encountered in the urban landscape. Its practitioners navigate the city in unexpected and subversive ways, imagining new political possibilities of existence with their movement. While most parkour scholarship has discussed the practice in terms of its spatial, political, and philosophic dimensions as a self-contained metaphor and object, little scholarship has looked to the cultural productions of parkour itself. As a dynamic and relatively young movement practice, parkour has evolved alongside the development of digital camera technologies and online social media, and as such, has a rich media culture that reflects parkour's unique relationship to movement and urban space. As camera technologies have become smaller, lighter, mobile, and more affordable, parkour's practitioners and the community have leveraged these emerging technologies to create new assemblages of media, bodies, and urban architectures that are easily shared via online platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. How do these movements, visions, and technologies inform our perceptions of public life and public space? What implications do these apparatus hold for our understandings of these assemblages? Following Jacques Rancière's articulation of aesthetics as a “specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships”, I examine the aesthetics of first person (FPV), 360 camera, and drone perspectives as well as the editing practices and narrative trends of parkour media productions to offer a parkour subjectivity of the city, one that understands the city as dynamic, relational, material, in-process, and embodied.