The Flâneur Revisited: Inverting the Gaze through Speculative Space
Overview
The Flâneur Revisited is a speculative provocation that asks: What happens when the gaze of the observer is returned? Borrowing from the 19th-century figure of the flâneur (the wandering, observing urban residents) this project explores surveillance, power, and embodiment in digital urban space.
Using virtual reality, the prototype placed viewers into an urban setting where the city itself watched back. Billboards blinked, windows pulsed, and the streets tracked movement. The project foregrounds questions around who gets to look, who is made visible, and how technologies reproduce urban cultures.
Hand-built model
AI-generated mockup
Reflection
This project preceded my formal training in speculative and anthropological design. In retrospect, it lacked methodological grounding, but it illuminated tensions I continue to work through today: the politics of visibility, the epistemology of space, and the ethics of immersive media.
Rather than offering solutions, it remains a critical vignette — a moment of reversal that has since shaped my interest in counter-narratives, sensory ethnography, and speculative space-making.