A cidade em estado de repetição: ensaio visual entre ilusão de frequência, percurso e arquivo fotográfico

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis investigates how the perceived recurrence of a tag in the urban landscape of Juiz de Fora, initially read as “369,” reconfigured attention, walking practices, and image production in the city. The experience is examined through the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, in dialogue with discussions of selective attention, memory, situated perception, and the availability heuristic. The research combines theoretical reflection with artistic practice, bringing together contributions from cognitive science, studies of walking as an aesthetic practice, and street photography. Everyday movement through the city is adopted as a method of observation, while photography transforms dispersed and ephemeral encounters with the urban signature into a visual archive. The resulting body of work does not seek to identify the author of the tag, locate all its occurrences, or construct an objective map of the city. Instead, it examines the perceptual, affective, and visual effects generated by the repetition of the mark across different streets, surfaces, and conditions of appearance. The visual essay brings together color photographs, relationships among presence, erasure, and trace, and black-and-white approaches, while also incorporating references from photography, music, fashion, design, and video games. The results indicate that perceived recurrence depends not only on the material presence of the tag, but also on the ways in which attention and memory begin to select and recognize it. The research concludes that walking, photography, and the archive operate as complementary means of elaborating this perceptual shift, while preserving the incompleteness, instability, and openness of the work to future developments.