The science of Metropolontology

Rome’s Mobile Timeline is a foray into the psychogeographical properties of urban existence.  The project questions how the morphology and embedded meanings of place affect people’s psychological relationships to a particular place, and thus human behavior and the course of events, and vice versa.  Stories collected during the project will add to personal and collective understandings of Rome, modifying the city’s past.  The revised Rome is built on personal and shared experience.  A participant's real memory of learning to ride a bicycle in Borghese Parc in 1976 could be layered upon an imagined flood in the year 2120, and overlaid again with an account of an historical hot air balloon ride that took place in the central park of Roma, Sweden in 1890.  Each of these stories adds to the repertoire of constantly changing mental constructions of Rome, a city that everyone holds within their mind.