High Sections / Low Leaps
Installation + Artistic Research
Speculative Urbanism between Low and High Tech
In collaboration with Zhen Wu, Tristan Braud, Sylvia Lee
2023-2024
This work is based on urban speculations inspired by the fast developing, fast-paced Shenzhen City in the Greater Bay Area, and more precisely, on a small neighborhood in its Longgang District far North of the center, which is currently undergoing urban development. This neighborhood, changing from farmland to a highly developed urban space in only a few decades, has inspired the artist to produce an art installation that uses an idiosyncratic mixed method involving custom-made sound design, AIGC, 3D modeling and rendering, simulation of the actual city, and a spatial installation setup with CRT monitors to reflect on potential and alternative futures of this neighborhood in a far distant time. The work reflects the relationship between construction noise, mechanical low-tech sound, urban development and so-called “high-tech parks.” The artist team presents a work that lets the viewer perceive a distant future through visual and sonic technologies. The key is that cities are increasingly technological, not only at their core of how they are built, maintained and controlled as “smart cities,” but also in the sense that humans who live, work and travel in cities use screens, earbuds, loudspeakers, cars and so on to navigate, use, and access the environment. This artwork posits that, in turn, these technologies and media change the ways in which humans perceive their surroundings – and AI as a novel form of mediator of existing content plays a crucial role in shaping contemporary human perception of the world.
#High Tech Cities
#Low Tech Sound
Production team: Zhen Wu (3d modeling), Tristand Braud (3d rendering), Sylvia Lee (AIGC), Minghim Tong (sound design), Zhaorui Liu (CRT shooting), Binghuang Xu (desk research), Yang Gu (assistance)
Exhibited at SeeD Pilot Project Exhibition, Shenzhen, 2023