You are about to experience a poetic drift – visual and auditory – while walking.
Depending on your pace, but also on the time of day, the season, the temperature, the surroundings, your experience will be different.
Dérives (Drifts in English) is a new kind of poetic application for smartphones. It makes it possible to connect body movement and writing which can be considered here as a gesture, a bodily engagement in space.Thus the poem which is read or listened to by the user is correlated with his/her walking pace. If the user walks fast, he/she becomes more active in the text (for example : « You’re moving towards the awakening of the day », « you are catching up with the night ») alternatively, if the user slows down or even stops, he/she is caught up by his/her surroundings (for example : « the day is drawing near and brushing past you », « the night is catching up with you »).
Dérives is the fruit of the collaboration between the poet Marine Riguet, the composer Hervé Zénouda, the author and researcher Serge Bouchardon, the researcher Erika Fülöp and a group of engineering students from the Université de technologie de Compiègne (Charles Fiers, Cécile Asselin, Antonin Guyot, Maylis de Talhouet, Augustin de Laubier).