Vessel

<Vessel> is an interactive installation that transforms one year of Seoul’s mobility data into a pulsing three-dimensional urban organism. Seoul is often imagined through spectacle: illuminated skylines, K-pop culture, and rapid development. Yet the city lives through ordinary movements rarely seen in that image: people commuting, going to school, returning home. Vessel amplifies them as the city’s vital circulation in two ways: urban mobility data is magnified into a monumental body, and the visitor’s heartbeat brings it to life.

Three strategies of amplification shape the design. First, abstraction removes streets, landmarks, and vehicles, making circulation itself the subject. Second, multi-scale legibility shows how individual movements build into a collective pulse. At the flow scale, the number of people moving is mapped to thickness, and travel speed to flow speed. At the district scale, the 25 district modules each consist of inflow, internal flow, and outflow, and their proportions of total movement are mapped to length. At the city scale, form and sound reveal daily and weekly rhythms across districts. Third, embodied interaction connects the visitor to the artwork. With a touchpad, the visitor rotates between districts and moves through the year. When they touch the sensor, the form synchronizes with their pulse, each heartbeat advancing Seoul by one day.

<Vessel> practices data physicalization in digital space and extends data visceralization, rebuilding urban mobility as a new phenomenon that shares its rhythm and circulation. Built from traces of moving bodies, it is in turn sensed through a body. The visitor’s pulse becomes part of the apparatus, so that observing and intervening become a single act. In this act, the visitor and the city are amplified together. The quiet pulse that sustains life and the ordinary movements that sustain the city beat as one.

Data: 2025 Capital Region Living Mobility Data, Seoul Metropolitan Government and KT.