Live Stage: Cao Fei’s “RMB City” [NYC]

Cao Fei: RMB City :: February 29 – April 5, 2008 :: Opening: February 29; 6-8 pm :: Lombard-Freid Projects, 531 West 26th Street, 2nd floor, New York NY

“Is this your city?” asked the young man. “It’s yours.” The angel answered.

RMB City has been created by Cao Fei’s avatar China Tracy as an experimental utopian world for the 3D online virtual community of Second Life. Institutions and investors have been invited to buy buildings in RMB City and program events and activities within them where other Second Life users can participate. Thousands of young people in Asia and around the world are embracing Second Life as a “parallel universe” on the Internet.

RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.

Lombard-Freid is providing China Tracy, as Chief Developer, with retail space for a New York RMB City leasing office and showroom. The public is invited to view an RMB City model, promotional videos, detailed RMB City photographs and go online via laptops providing real time links to RMB City under construction in Second Life.

The pure white RMB City Model proposes an ideal futuristic city in three dimensions for viewers outside of Second Life. China Tracy’s RMB City video projected onto a reflection pool showcases the myriad details of the metropolis – exposing layers of urban activity and the dense beauty of its architecture.

Also on view i.Mirror, Cao Fei’s quasi-documentary of China Tracy’s adventures in Second Life over a 6 month period premiered at the last Venice Biennale. i-Mirror the 3-part machinima of her Second Life experience inspired Cao Fei aka China Tracy to build RMB City.

Cao Fei’s recent exhibitions include: Brave New Worlds at the Walker Art Center, and Laughing In A Foreign Language at The Hayward Gallery, London. The 10th International Istanbul Biennial, the 52nd International Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennial, China Power Station: Part 1, at the Serpentine Gallery, and China Power Station: Part II, at Astrup Fearley Museum of Modern Art. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo retrospective at Le Plateau, Paris.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 3:08PM

Edushi: China’s Cities Drawn and Mapped

Whilst Google uses satellite imagery, photographs and map overlays to create their mapping systems, China’s Edushi uses intricate (and quite incredible) computer-based drawings to create their city maps. Edushi will ‘virtually represent’ many Chinese cities – a part of Hong Kong is shown above (and that’s the city-demo you can use on their site). Each proposed city map will be complete with virtual community, game-like emulation advertisements and directory features. Try not to spend quite a bit of time here exploring and marvelling at the remarkable (and zoom-able) bird’s-eye views of Hong Kong.

It’s interesting to draw parallels with the pixel-illustrations of eBoy, but thus far, Edushi doesn’t feature giant destructive robots and scantily-clad women riding missiles. Via PSFK.

Originally from One Plus One Equals Three by Andrew Haig
reBlogged by michael on Dec 12, 2007, 9:22PM

Transitory Homes Exhibition in Brasilia

Transitory Homes – “About invisible cities, or how to be alone, when accompanied.”

This came in the mail, it looked good, they have no website. Maybe you need another reason to visit Brazil? Jetsetters check it out! Excellent work around the theme of homeless life – in a museum by Oscar Niemeyer! Runs through February 11th.

Curated by Nicola Goretti, info ( a t ) grupoag.net

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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 4, 2008, 2:09PM

Sean Hanna

Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems in architecture, and in structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology. I’ve selected a couple of his projects to give a sample of his work but check out his website for more details. His work is part of the currently running “Capture & Context” exhibition I posted on early this week.

BODY / SPACE / FRAME

Sean role in the BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley was in the creation of methods for generating a body formally and constructing a geometry appropriate for and structurally constructing the 25 metre high sculpture. Built out of an open steel lattice in the shape of a crouching figure, it was sited on the end of an 800 metre polder and faced outward from the coast of the Zuiderzee, Holland.

PAN_07 CHAIR

Optimised cellular structure in collaboration with Timothy Schreiber

Based on an analogy with the highly efficient cellular structure of living wood or bone, which adapts to its environment as it grows, the chair’s interior is comprised of a fine lattice that minimises weight while maximising strength. The design method combines principles of evolution and artificial intelligence to create a material that responds to its environment by growing denser in the areas required to best withstand the external forces applied when the chair is in use.

Sean’s website

Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by Ruairi
reBlogged by michael on Dec 6, 2007, 4:46PM

Designs for urban living: In-house crops

While urban farms in Detroit are making use of reclaimed land to grow crops, Israeli architecture firm Knafo-Klimor is designing that process into new buildings. The firm’s “Agro-Housing” concept (which recently won the International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing) combines an apartment building with low-maintenance greenhouses: “[The resident] has to plant the seeds and that is all,” says architect David Knafo. “The irrigation is automatic, the greenhouse is sealed against insects and there is no need for pesticide, and the windows provide the light and heat necessary for growth.”

The concept will serve as a model for prototypes in rapidly urbanizing China, starting with the city of Huan. More on the concept here.

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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Oct 9, 2007, 9:05AM

WikiCity, an MIT project

How can a city perform as an open-source real-time system. Although the approach of this project seems to be driven quite a lot by a cultural engineering mindset, there are some interesting people-focused elements in it: In the past decades, real time control systems have been developed in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, regulation of the dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real time control system? This is the aim of the WikiCity project at MIT. Let’s examine the four key components of a real time control system: entity to be controlled in an environment characterised by uncertainty; sensors able to acquire information about the entity’s state in real-time; intelligence capable of evaluating system performance against desired outcomes; physical actuators able to act upon the system to realise the control strategy. A city certainly fits the definition of point 1, and point 2 does not seem to pose particular problems. As an example, the Real Time Rome project used cellphones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems, and their spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. But how to actuate the city? Although the city already contains several classes of actuators such as traffic lights and remotely updated street signage, a much more flexible actuator would be the city’s own inhabitants. Consequently, we are creating a new platform for storing and exchanging data which are location and time-sensitive, making them accessible to users through mobile devices, web interfaces and physical interface objects. This platform enables people to become distributed intelligent actuators, which pursue their individual interests in cooperation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. The project vision, which is driven by Carlo Ratti’s SENSEable City Lab, is currently being implemented in Rome, Italy. Visit project website

Originally from Putting people first by PuttingPeopleFirst
reBlogged by michael on Oct 7, 2007, 9:14AM

Book review: Verb Natures

Verb Natures (Amazon USA and UK), edited by: Albert Ferré, Irene Hwang, Tomoko Sakamoto, Ramon Prat, Michael Kubo, Mario Ballesteros and Anna Tetas.

Editor’s blurb: “What is fascinating is the inability to separate the real from the digital, because they already form part of the same nature.” So we said in the last issue of Verb. Here we explore how this fusion takes place. Buildings and cities grow, are transformed, and dissolve. How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new architectural organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate space, and how do users and programs animate matter? The fifth volume of Actar’s boogazine looks for a new definition of the organic.

A “boogazine”? It’s a hybrid volume designed to combine the flexibility of a magazine with the depth and format of a book. Published since 2002 by Barcelona-based editor Actar, each of the boogazines explores a specific aspect of current architectural production.

I wish they had kept the book habit to write a few lines about the editors.

The AlgorithmicSpace

Don’t be fooled by the term “natures”. Here, the “natural” often looks supernatural and its realization is most of the time informed by algorithms, strict geometry rules and other mathematical processes. The book is thus quite techy but even i could understand what the techniques are about. I found that it was actually the strong point of the book: the many images, graphics, interviews with the designers, researchers or architects and clear explanations of the vocabulary and building strategies made me feel very smart. I managed to get a deeper understanding of construction and design processes which i would otherwise find too arcane and sophisticated.

Beijing’s Watercube (more images)

The book focusses on over 20 projects, some are ueber-famous, others were new to me. I was particularly happy to get more insight on the Beijing National Aquatics Centre (nicknamed “the watercube”) or R&Sie; fabulous Dusty Relief in Bangkok. The book goes beyond buildings and looks at interactive rooms (Ada in Zurich), ports (Fugee Port in Taiwan), the artificial reconstruction of a natural mountain (the Dénia project on the Spanish coast) but also design projects such as Clemens Weisshaar & Reed Kram’s Breeding Tables which were launched 2 years ago (and with much press coverage and public wonder) at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Oh, yeah! and there’s even some arty projects like the Brooklyn Pigeon Project.

The Puppet Theatre (Images)

A few years ago, architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch decided to record New York from the perspective of the movements of a flock of birds. They equipped pigeons with wireless video cameras and microphones, turning them into satellites that fed images and sounds of the city below. As the architects explained in an interview for the book “In conventional satellite and aerial mappings of the earth, an enormous amount of effort is dedicated to squeezing out any trace of movement from the image and even from the environment.” (…) “So by reintroducing time into the map ours is in some ways a more accurate depiction of the world. But funny enough, this doesn’t make it any better map.”

More in this video intro and interview.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Dec 31, 1969, 4:59PM

RECONFIGURABLE HOUSE: HACKING LOW TECH ARCHITECTURE

By Usman HAQUE & Adam SOMLAI-FISCHER using sensors and actuators developed by the Reorient Team.

The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors. The project is a critique of “smart homes”,which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY. Smart homes actually aren’t very smart simply because they are pre-wired according to algorithms and decisions made by designers of the systems, rather than the people who occupy the houses.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Apr 26, 2007, 1:41PM

Reactive Environments: Gestural Control for Navigation and Understanding

In the words of a recent song, I’m not dead, just floating. After a busy travel period, I settled in to get some reading and other writing done, hence the pause in Smartspace content. Spring is here, and content will now bloom like the trees outside my window.

BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.

Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently – the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside – a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).

More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above. 

Originally from Smartspace by Scott Smith
reBlogged by michael on Mar 26, 2007, 2:30PM

Pixelated Pulse Art Fair

A prominent motif at the Pulse art fair in NYC last week, pixelation was evident in a number of works in various mediums. From afar, these works can be read as a whole, but close up, the image starts to break down and the individual elements of the composition become more dominant. Here are a selection of some of our favorites. Click on any of the images for a more detailed view.

The buzz around the Catherine Clark Gallery booth had a lot to do with “The Morning After Portraits” by Andy Diaz Hope. Made of gel-caps, the series shows images of people in front of their medicine cabinets or in their local pharmacies with hangovers, headaches and other illnesses self-inflicted or otherwise. (Pictured above right.) A more literal comment on our pill-popping culture than Damien Hirst’s similar work, Hope comments, “We are no longer a sum of our natural history, but a sum of our natural history plus our self selected recreational and medical regimes.”

At first glance, the installation by Devorah Sperber presented by the Marcia Wood Gallery, looks like randomly arranged different colored spools of thread. However, a clear acrylic sphere placed in front of the work shrinks and condenses the thread spool “pixels” into an easily-read image of a masterpiece—in this case Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”—and the convex shape flips the imagery 180 degrees. A mimicry of how the brain and eye process visual data, Sperber’s work plays with ideas about the past, craft, visual theories and art itself. Check out more of her work at the Brooklyn Museum until 6 May 2007.

Referencing cubists like Picasso and other early 20th-century painters, Isidro Blasco, recently exhibited at DCKT Contemporary, turns the 2-dimensional media of photography into a 3-dimensional experience by piecing together multiple photos. Using board-mounted photographs, he combines multiple angles and architecture to explore perception in relation to physical experience. Blasco’s sculptures draw the observer into the piece, so that the experience of it feels new rather than a straight portrayal of the scene. The photographic sculpture pictured (right), “Side Building,” measures 107 x 120 x 72 inches . See more of his work here.

More of a dot-matrix than pixels, William Betts of the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, re-creates surveillance camera images by carefully dripping acrylic paint onto canvas. Using digital information, he creates work that is abstract, organic and realistic. Again, a macro view (above right) becomes an abstraction but a step back (above left) reveals a realistic surveillance camera shot. Also on Cool Hunting, Betts’ work from last years Scope art fair uses digital information (and in this case techniques) to create graphics. See more from this series of work here.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, presented by Margaret Thatcher Projects, exhibited sculptural works made of small canvas-covered blocks. Estrada-Vega considers each square as its own distinct painting, hence show titles like, “4000 Paintings/14 Compositions.” Given the modularity of the pixel-like pieces (they’re attached with magnets), the mini-paintings have the potential to be rearranged infinitely into new compositions. The colors, inspired by the artist’s Mexican heritage, look somewhat monochromatic from afar. Only up close do the ultra-saturated colors reveal themselves, an aspect further accentuated by the topographic nature of the blocks. Maceo (far left) is composed of wax, oleopasto, oil, limestone and pigment on canvas and measures 18 x 18 inches. More effective in person, these photos do not do the works much justice.

Originally from Cool Hunting by Tim Yu
reBlogged by michael on Mar 1, 2007, 9:07PM