A Grain Of
Series of Installations + Artistic Research
Rendering Shenzhen's Techno-Natural Materialities Audible+Visible
Enza Migliore + Marcel Zaes + Team
2022-2024
A Grain Of | Hybrid Matter (2022)
A Grain Of | Materializations (2023)
A Grain Of | Ambiguous Matter (2024)
“A Grain Of” is an ongoing technology-driven project that aims to read and sense emerging urban environments through their materiality, in the example of Shenzhen. The complexity of the city is rendered through conceptual manipulation of data collected over eight weeks of extensive fieldwork at three exemplary locations: a mountainous urban forest, an under-construction high-tech area on reclaimed land, and a densely populated, historical retail area. The collected materials, both physical and digital, show how the matter we live with daily are assemblages shaped by human, geological, industrial, and technological forces, characterized with the specifics of Shenzhen. The idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary approach allows this project to expand beyond physical matter to sonic, magnetic, vibrational, and digital artifacts. Interdisciplinary methods of speculative design and scientific data re-interpretation are then combined with advanced manufacturing and digital media technologies. To date, this project has resulted in two scholarly publications and three art installations, each of which marked with a distinct subtitle. The art installations aim at bringing the audience quite literally “into” a small grain of the city of Shenzhen, by rendering its materiality sensible on a micro scale. Thereby, the invisible, inaudible, and unnoticeable is augmented into a fictional display of the city’s smallest “grains.”
#Urban Matter
#Urban Sound
Production team and collaborators: Hanyu Qu, Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Yiyuan Bai, Bo Dong, Zhiyi Zhang, Zhaorui Liu, Minghim Tong, Simeng Wang, Xiaoyao Ma, Zichun Xiao, Zhonghui Tang
For more, see also the publication:
Enza Migliore, Hanyu Qu, and Marcel Zaes Sagesser. 2023. A Grain of: A Multimodal Representation of the City’s Ecology Through Material and Sound. In TEI ’23: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’23), February 26- March 1, 2023, Warsaw, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (doi)