The City Project

Catalogs

I was inspired to think about types of public transportations found within cities. These are examples of the different types of buses you can find. Considering a place that is constant but mobile - what if buses could be designed as a type of home? Or place of work? Like a City of Camper Vans and Buses.

The wires catalog began as a study of wires, entanglements, and structures, but soon after making this study I started to see wires as a type of window - a sort of frame to look through. These are the many examples of wire framing that can be found in cities. Some seem tighter and mesh like and others seems loose and easy to see through.

This catalog is a study on the connection between stairs and social class. As I documented stair cases I started to notice that each example looked different depending on location. An expensive hotel or whether I was at a hidden stairway in LA next to a homeless encampment each one had a uniqueness to it. Not only are they a connection to different levels, but they serve as a connection to status within the city.

City Excursion Takeaways

I found myself inspired by stairs. I saw stairs as a type of bridge to different interfaces. Stairs can be a place for gathering, community, and listening. Stairs can be a place for tourism and people watching. Stairs can take you to monuments, vistas, history and culture. Stairs can be behind bars, tucked away leading to places unknown. Stairs can also appear different depending on social class. Stairs can be political.

I found glimpses of what I like to think of as the guts of a city. Wires sticking out, weird plastic cylinders with numbers labeled on them. A metallic skeleton with attachments everywhere. I wonder what the a city would look like if everything else was stripped away except for the wires and guts that light it up at night.

I remember as a kid playing with my toys and pretending to build cities out of them. Sometimes I'd make homes for my toys out of dirt, legos, twigs and leaves. Little cars going through tunnels built out of sand, action figures scaling tall furniture imagined to be buildings.

Imaginary City Drawings:

City of Bus Life

The City of Bus Life is composed of buildings made from buses. After fossil fuel is banned this type of technology will become obsolete. The remaining bus shells could make cozy homes, offices, and work places for many.

City of Transitions

The City of Transition is made from photogrammetry scans of stairs and bridges. In this city the people are constantly in a state of transition as they are moving down, up, and across to get to where they want to go. The city is fragmented as if it was permanently in a state of loading, the ethos of the city.

City of Disrupted Views

The City of Disrupted Views is constantly in a state of flux. Its citizens are always on the move as they slide from wire to wire. The city cannot function without the kinetic energy as it fuels the city with electricity. Although everyone is on the move and seemingly headed somewhere their view of a destination is disrupted by wire and movement.

Piecing Projects Together...

Collaborating Designers: ALAN AMAYA, ALISON CHANG, GUOWEI LYU, RONGDA TAO, ZEYU WANG, QIANYUE YUWEN

The Eye of Providence City, named after the "All-Seeing Eye of God,” to symbolize a benevolent order; Maintained by the eye machines who keep a watchful eye over the lower corners of the city. The all seeing machines are not allowed in the upper half of the city because residents who live closer to the "Great Architect Of the Universe" are least likely to commit crimes...so they say.

This photograph was taken by one of the all seeing machines in the lower level of the city. It depicts the development of the city. Made from old transportation vehicles called buses. Residents who are considered working class live in the lower level people here are always under the watchful eye.

This image taken by a passing residents show the way in which machines detect suspicious behavior. Whispering is considered suspicious and the machines work to identify people who are to be kept under heavy surveillance. This couple has been missing since this photo was taken.

The eye machines follow residents throughout the city, always knowing where and what they are doing. This is designed to control citizen behavior and prevent actions that may be considered a threat to the ruling class.

Project Brief:

Your brief is to create a city, a metropolis. This is, of course, an absurd task to try to tackle literally. Your project - your city - will be a creative and radical abstraction, a speculative imagining where certain conditions or situations are reinterpreted and amplified. Crucially, rather than taking a top-down approach to designing your city, you will create it from the inside out. You will let its form emerge through the act of combining custom parts which you will formulate. Consider your city as a condition which spreads out in all directions, an immersive environment without beginning or end. Your custom kit of design elements – the building blocks of your city – will emerge from your group's shared and individual investigations, interests, subjective experiences. Your city will ultimately take the form of a composite multimedia drawing, which you will collectively engineer, annotate, and imagine inhabiting.

Project Statement

Digital Altar is designed as a place to find creative power. What motivated me to make it is to discover a new understanding of practice and ritual through the process of making. As a creative, I sometimes myself confronted with creative blocks. A lot of times this is due to stress and anxiety that tend to inhibit my creative ability. Therefore I wanted to create a power that uses the blocks to gain access to something new and lean into it. The way that I have interpreted super power is rooted in spiritual and ritual practices. Having a consistent practice like meditation or art, I can gain a deeper relationship with the self and gain access to new abilities that strengthen the practice.

I embarked on a ritualistic path of making, to put this idea into practice. I made 3D digital altars, made from GIFs; ingredients from the internet, and then I made a 11.5x11.5 acrylic cube, with a laser cut pixelated texture, as a relic to offer the altar. By offering a 3D GIF to the altar the system becomes circular, and therefore regenerative. Creating a regenerative cycle between the physical and the digital is a new practice I am proposing through this project. I am inspired by a quote by Alfred Gell from his essay, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” where he makes the comparison between art and religion, “Just as anthropology of religion commences with the explicit or implicit denial of the claims religions make on believers, so the anthropology of art has to begin with a denial of the claims which objects of art make on the people who live under their spell, and also on ourselves, in so far as we are all self-confessed devotees of the Art Cult.” (Gell 42). Which makes me wonder about the properties of art that ensnare an audience to it. Gell goes on to argue that the Technology of Enchantment is based on the technical process which casts a spell in order to see the real world in an enchanted form. As such I was interested in investigating the technical process that art uses in order to cast a spell, such as gestalt properties which pull in observers by exploiting characteristic biases of human visual perception which work to find patterns. I wanted to work with GIFs because they have a circular pattern, and hypnotic gestalt properties. I invite others to join in on the ritual by following the instructions in the video and create a dialectic with the work.