City of in/visible
- collage / speculative design -
Brief
This project is inspired by a 4-week workshop to create a city of emergent conditions, a speculative imaging metropolis. I adapted the prompts to learn speculative design with an inside-out approach.
Tools: AdobePhotoshop, Pen, and Paper
Photo Credits: Rear Window, New York Times, 17 Again, Black Mirror, Apple, Victoria Secret, GLOBAL PEOPLE, clueless, Marriage Story, The Conjuring
Date: Sep 2021
//City Excursions
Starting with thinking about what makes a city feel like a city and individual pieces that make it whole, I took 3 inspirational excursions both physically and virtually, to Westlake Park, airports, and to London.
Since parks often serve its cultural function by providing citizens a place for leisure or other social gatherings, they are loaded with collective memories. In my first excursion, I observed the Westlake park through time.
It used to be the most popular open-air resort and the area for the upper class. Now it is a place where immigrants live and looks hugely different than it did a hundred years ago.
What brought about such dramatic change? Does this change reflect the entire symbiosis of the city? Is it an indictment of the growing gap between various groups of city dwellers that nevertheless live as a whole, or
does it reflect not the symbiosis, but the antibiosis?
On the second excursion, I thought about spaces, places and the so-called non-places: places without a significance.
To some, non-places are indeed non-places. Yet to others, non-places are places.
Who gave these places the name "non-places"? Who gives them significance? Who decides what these places provide, and to whom they provide what they provide?
In other words,
who "sees" the places and what do they see in them?
The two excursions above lead me to my third excursion.
Surveillance is an amalgamation of power, coalition, and segregation in that
it exercises control over everyone in "sight", yet at the same time disperses what it "sees".
On one hand, it is a technology to spy on people, making it seem cold and distant (surveillance capitalism). On the other hand, the overall design of this system puts the preservation of historical buildings and the needs of mundane life at the forefront.
It symbolizes vigilance, yet propagates ignorance; not wanting to be seen, but always in the position of seeing.
The relation of citizens under surveillance is one of symbiosis and antibiosis, of seeing and being seen.
This apparently conflicting relationship under surveillance piqued my curiosity. What purpose exactly does it serve? Does it change the way people go about their daily lives, or the way they interact with others? What would it be like in a city of surveillance?
In the following weeks, I decided to further my surveillance idea. I developed my kit of speculative design actors by exploring downtown LA, trying to capture different interesting positions and ways surveillance cameras exist (deceived/disguised) in the city, their different angles of city views(what they see/capture), and their connection and distribution within the city(relation and interaction with city symbiosis). I began to wonder...
What if citizens become the moving cameras themselves, surveilling and being surveilled?
Furthermore, what would happen if people are born with different levels of being surveilled, and they fully recognized it? How would they behave and interact with each other?
//City drawings
I came up with three contrasting ‘idea worlds’ by combining my kits systematically and thinking about their connection, creating a city with every part relating to a single idea (per city).
In the City of in/visible, citizens all have different levels of being surveilled since they were born, on which all interactions are based upon. Everyone can see others’ trails and history, but not themselves' and whether or not the content they received are ‘real’.
The City of Surveillance Weather is built off of regions with different surveillance levels just like weathers. Apart from the previous focus on interaction, this city is to explore how different experiences of surveillance in general influence human behaviour.
The City of “Personalization” is set in a near future, where big tech enterprises replace countries and become the leading powers in the world. ‘Personal’ systems tailored for individuals create boundaries of world views between us by determining what we can see.
Finally... //City of in/visible
Merging the concepts from the three cities, the City of in/visible came into being.
Through some drawings and iterations, I felt it would be best to approach the city in collage, combining different communication methods to capture the whole city structure and urban fabrics including various aspects and situations. I presented the city of in/visible from different view angles and zooming sizes, from the inside, outside, from the floor and as a whole, combining my drawings with collages to demonstrate how the mechanism works on each individual and the environment.
In the City of in/visible, we all live in a virtual world of surveillance. In this world, reality is the background, and virtuality is the actual reality. The saturation of colors will show the objects’ levels of being surveilled, the lower the saturation in color the closer to reality. The contents collected from the surveillance cameras are presented in different levels of images showing fake and real events surrounding us. The blue and green trails following people are their footprints. Some people leave a trail, some don’t, while the red and green dots represent the level they are being warned and categorized by the surveillant. A relaxed area and the Lake of Solace in the middle is where people can pay for not being surveilled for a while.
When physical reality no longer exists as a yardstick, and we know that it is the case, how do we hold ourselves, and how can we interact with others? In such a world, what does it mean by seeing: seeing with your eyes, or seeing with loaded significance?
What is seeing, and unseeing?
Final Thoughts
My favorite part of the project was iterating on my City of in/visible. There are so many different ways to present people being surveilled on different levels, and differentiate the visible and invisible. Illustrating people's interactions and their daily lives in this city is my main aim, and organizing the entire picture to allow both micro and macro perspectives is my main challenge. I would like to further develop different ways to present the story.
