Project

Under Construction =Rare Earth 创设纪-稀土: Hacking the City=

** THE POROSITY ANGLE ** Over the past decade Porosity Studios have used the city as a plastic material. The studio mantra is “Come and test your discipline and spatial intelligence at the scale of the city”. In other words what happens to the materiality, devices, philosophy, social construction, aesthetics etc of your work when its task is to interrogate the organism of a city?

You can be a jeweller, a potter, a painter, a drawer, an urban planner, an architect, a furniture designer etc and still the project calls you to observe the city 1:1 scale and to transform some aspect of it, either theoretically, virtually or directly.

It doesn’t have to rearrange the transport system, but it could. It doesn’t have to repair park seating but it could re-invent the 3 legged stool. It doesn’t have to bring solar power to every high rise building but it could harness the sound of crickets to thermally insulate an apartment or reveal the hallways of office blocks to the subway commuters. Anything is possible as you play and change the game, as all artists and designers are wont to do. You are the game-changers and we are physically and virtually going to hack Shanghai in September 2011.

Shanghai is the laboratory of the future. If the experiment of 20million people in Shanghai, all wanting Audis, all wanting parks to fall in love in, all wanting dumplings doesn’t work, then the world is truly doomed. It is at critical mass. You can’t solve this but you can get involved. Porosity, augment_me and Collabor8 incite you to act as part of an elective course.

What differs about this 2 week studio from previous Porosity Studios, is its mode of practice. Unlike the usual 2 weeks of finding the idea, presenting, modelling, collaborating if you choose, and then the finally exhibiting the work, has been shifted into the production of a continual flux of outcomes. By employing and experimenting with Brad Miller’s multi-imaging process in the gallery, your process will be continually monitored and streamed into the system as a projection in real-time onto the gallery walls. The public will be involved directly in this iterative process and the gallery will be alive with the production of the information feed and the comings and goings of the designer/artists as they hack the city. The public is open to this process and will inturn find them involved in deciphering the combined outcomes and how they paint their city.

The gallery will become the crucible of the city as a laboratory. Multiple visions will become one fused action. The “Fluxus” of the 21st Century.

** Professor Richard Goodwin. ** ** Director of the Porosity Studio. **