Urban Trail Portraits

About Urban Trail Portraits

Trails that are situated close to urban centres have long fascinated me. My own personal engagement with the Don Valley Trail system in Toronto, having ridden some of these trails hundreds of times, has encouraged me to look inward at these trails and outward to other urban trails. These spaces are literally and metaphorically in-between, straddling our constructions of the urban and the natural. Being typically high use by a variety of users on a regular basis, these trails are much loved by their users who have a high level of ownership and personal investment in them. My ongoing Urban Trail Portraits series presents my perspectives on these gems.

Images in this project are created as follows. Video is captured while riding the trail. It is then manipulated and laid out using custom software written in Cycling '74's Max 6. The custom software collapses each frame into a single pixel line and places these lines side-by-side producing very high resolution representations of my experience on the trail. The files are then output and printed.

Dale Ball on display at: