Slow Down (You Move Too Fast): designing mechanics to encourage practices of ‘ecological perception’ through mobile digital performances

ABSTRACT Slow Down (You Move Too Fast) is a mobile digital performance that the audience member experiences via headphones as they walk for fifty minutes outdoors. During the performance the audience member is encouraged to physically slow down the movement of their body as they walk, from a comfortable walking pace to extreme slow motion. As they slow down, they experience aural soundscapes that evoke progressively slower temporal rhythms in nature, from the circadian rhythm of a single day passing through to the millennial long cycle of rock eroding and moving. Drawing on Laura Sewall’s insight into the ‘skill of ecological perception’ the work sought to utilise the mechanics of slowing down to engage the audience member in an embodied reflection on the interconnection of their body with the natural world around them, and on the temporal practices that shape their awareness of this interconnection. This practice-as-research reflection explores theoretical inspirations and how these were translated into the goals and design of the work. It then examines participant responses and offers insights into whether, and how, mechanics that evoke sensory engagement can allow participants to develop an expanded sense of an ‘ecological self’.