A focused look into Shanghai’s urban landscape shift overtime due to screen integration and how Shanghai’s future urban landscape may look like with increased integration. Trying to solve the question of if Shanghai is in danger of shifting into a ‘Generic City’: a generic city meaning a city with no history or identity, it is completely free of context.
Enlarge
Enlarge
Shanghai has a unique relationship with using media facades to stay futuristic and modern. However, through the development of this relationship and integration of screens into the city’s urban landscape, Shanghai’s urban landscape has started to shift towards Rem Koolhaas’s prediction of a Generic City. The project is an extension and exploration of looking into how an increase in the integration of screens into Shanghai’s urban landscape over the past two decades will shape the future urban landscape. Focusing on the hyper-reality future of what Shanghai would look like as it continuously shifts towards a Generic City. The project home page is an interactive map of Shanghai with two specific locations within Shanghai. These two locations are two of the most well-known city landmarks, with high levels of screen integration. By clicking into one of the two locations would bring a user into the main focus of this project of an interactive 360-degree photo in which users have the ability to move around and explore the image. The image had been edited to explore what the location may look like as a developing hyper-reality. The home page also connects to an informational page that gives the users a brief overview of the topic and project, with instructional information on how to interact with the project. Developing what a generic city may look like in the future raises the question of what other larger metropolises urban landscapes would start to look like and in which aspects would these metropolises become either similar or entirely the same. It also brings forth the question of distinctive famous landmarks within these large metropolises bring enough identity into a city to help hinder the city from becoming a generic city, or would the famous landmarks simply start to blend into hyper-reality with screens and advertisement overrun the city? An expansion of this project would be an exploration into how the integration of screens into other major metropolises such as New York, London, Paris, and so on, would affect the urban landscape of these cities. The exploration of these cities should focus on at what point of screen integration into the urban landscape would turn these metropolises to look the same or very eerily similar.
Tags:#360degreephoto#ShanghaiScreens#InteractivePhoto
Skyler Liu | The Scene Inside: A Cinematic Installation
A cinematic installation that uses the stylistic devices of film (light/shadow, colors and sound) to create an immersive experience of troubled inner mental states, in order to help people have a deeper understanding of mental problems.
Enlarge
Enlarge
Enlarge
The Scene Inside is a video installation that uses the aesthetic features of film to create an immersive experience of troubled inner mental states in order to help people have a deeper understanding of mental problems.
Many films and television shows can successfully depict characters with disturbing inner mental states. The most dramatic scenes can give the audience a profound impression of the character’s troubled mental world without the use of dialogue. Beyond the obvious narrative devices of film – storyline, dialogue, characters, and themes – what are the techniques particular to video that allow it to express the characters’ inner mental states?
The installation sets a scene inside a dark room. The whole room is enveloped by a low-key blue lighting, raising the mood of repression and loneliness. A flashlight on mirrored paper creates disturbing reflections that rapidly change on the wall indicating the chaotic environment. Cooperating with the visual, the room uses a chaotic stereo soundscape to evoke the audience’s fear, loneliness, or depression.
Skye Gao | Sentient Complex: Cybernetic Ecology for Spacial Formation
Sentient Complex is a project that consists of an ecology of responsive agents that attempt to collectively identify and perceive the emerging behavior of the visitors. Considered as an extension of the function of architecture, this complex of agents suggests new hybrids that span across different dimensions and forms.
Sentient Complex is a project that investigates in the fields of interactive architecture where spaces are considered as capable of sensing and actuating. With the advancement of related technology, the perception of architecture is becoming more fluid. Architecture is no longer considered as static or exists on human terms, but rather as living entities able to respond and adapt to changing conditions. Such notions of responsiveness and involvement allow architectural space to engage in conversations as well as reciprocal experience with its occupants, and ultimately have it become a more sentient presence. This project, hence, investigates an alternative consideration of architecture as living, sentient presence which, along with its occupants, constitutes a system where communication is primarily elicited by sentience and empathy is perceived through mutual experience.
The project consists of an ecology of responsive agents that attempt to collectively identify and perceive the emerging behavior of the visitors. It focuses on kinetic interactions, examining forms of non-verbal dialogue between human and architectural agency. Considered as an extension of the function of architecture, this complex of agents suggests new hybrids that span across different dimensions and forms. Each of the agents shares a similar appearance consisting of a rotating surface embedded with sensor and lights to inform the interaction with the visitors, and also a main body of actuators which drives its motion. In a darkened environment, the agents are attached to several self-standing supporting structures, and are distributed with different positions and orientations to form a spatial configuration.
By responding to the stimuli in their surroundings independently, the complex of agents constantly re-configure the spatial formation and presents a functional and aesthetic potency in harnessing emergent patterns of behavior from the cybernetic system. Such a behavior pattern, with much room for speculation and development, is considered as a potentiality for connecting the sense of artificial life with architectural space. By endowing the architectural agents sentience and personalities, this project seeks to create a sensation of communication between independent agents which is not only compelling, but also, in some cases, emotionally affective.
Tags:#ResponsiveSpace#Cybernetics#HMI
Xiaoyan Kong | Partings and Togetherness: Partings & Togetherness, Memory & Loss
This is an art installation designed to share how migrant families have been impacted due to changes in society, public policies, and the education system. It tells the stories of Partings and Togetherness, Memory and Loss in the phenomenon of first-born children left behind in the countryside and second-borns growing up in China’s cities.
I am a migrant worker’s child who grew up in Shanghai. My older sister was ‘left behind’ in our family’s village in Anhui. Though we are siblings our memories of our childhood – moments we had together and the time we were apart are very different. This project explores the phenomenon of China’s “left behind children” and “migrant workers children” from a unique and very personal angle. I interviewed my sister who was left behind in rural China. Then, I conducted more interviews of other siblings who have similar experiences with us back in my hometown in Anhui. For many years, most of the studies in China have been focused on the issues of “left-behind children” and “migrant worker’s children” separately, to study how the changes of education system, public policies and parenting have impacted them. In my project “Partings and Togetherness, Memories and Loss”, I intend to gather some common and symbolic elements that were found along with my interviews with those siblings. Therefore, to create the atmosphere for the audiences to explore the feelings me and my interviewees expressed. Through the display of various media contents that used to express emotions and feelings, audiences are also encouraged to explore how those two groups of children have been influenced by changes of education system, public policies and parenting, etc.
Peter Wang | The Basket: A Most Sophisticated Design
It is ALMOST a shopping basket. Don’t be fooled: the seriousness and thoughtful intention of its creator cannot hide the whimsical and hilarious nature of this basket.
The intention behind this design is simple: to create an automated check-out system in the retail context. Trying to capture the best parts of Amazon’s (image-recognition & intuitive) and Uniqlo’s (RFID & accurate) checkout system, “The Basket” features a range RFID scanner and an intricate mechanical design that allows the basket to unload what’s contained inside. Supposedly, this would simplify the check-out process and ultimately improve customer’s shopping experience. However, due to its creator’s overemphasis on the special mechanics and display, it simply fails as a shopping basket although being fully functional, and is doomed to be just a whimsical design, making it more well known for its absurdity and irony despite all the serious intentions of its creator. In another word, “The Basket” started out as a highly practical project with entrepreneurial implication, but ended up as a rather “artistic” piece or more of a performance art with its creator winding up being a part of the display with his deadpan demonstration of its functionality.
Tags:#ShoppingBasket#PerformanceArt#MechanicalDesign