User-generated videos of urban exploration and the production of affective space

This article posits that user-generated videos have the potential to modulate affective maps of, or the aggregation of our intensive dispositions towards, urban areas. It argues that bodily topologies, which reside in our neurological substrates, are the primary source of our cognitive understandings of space and that user-generated videos have the capacity to affect these maps through their circulation of multisensory rhetorics. Taken together, these videos’ tendency to obscure their images’ photo-realistic qualities and to provide visual and sonic sensations disrupt the potential for identification and encourage haptic modes of viewing that work primarily at the level of the virtual. As a case study, this article engages videos produced by self-styled urban explorers that provide tours of abandoned buildings in Detroit, Michigan. These videos, it argues, work through lighting, unsteady cameras, sound, image durations, and movement through space, to imbue the buildings with kinetic energies that may modulate audiences’ dispositions towards the Motor City.