Emergent Conditions
Dev Grad Lab | Ben Hooker | Media Design Practices
Group Partners: Hongming Li, Zheng Wang, Shiyi Chen, GiAh Kim, and Zhiyan Wang
Tools: Miro, Cinema 4D, Adobe Illustrator, Procreate, Blender
Emergent Conditions is an in class project composed of individual and group assignments. With the intent to create something together and follow our own curiosities, we shared our interests, preoccupations, expertise, and perspectives.
The brief is to create a city, a metropolis.
This 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.
Every week the whole class will meet and each group will deliver a fresh PechaKucha presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide) to update the class on their progress. Groups will need to coordinate ahead of time so we can dive straight into the presentations at the start of class. Although one person in each group should take on the role of running the slide deck and sharing their screen, we expect all group members to talk during their group's presentation. In the final week, each group will present a tour of their city.
Process
We are tasked to go out into the city we are located and find inspiration and connections to what we believe is meaningful to composing a city.
Process
We are tasked to take three specific interest areas derived from past and new research excursions and flush out these interests in a kit. Each kit is a collection of building blocks, but not a literal construction set which fits together. These collection should each be about one specific idea or topic.
Process
Visualize and interpret these kits as specific landscapes. These landscapes should present the essence of an epic and an intimate environment.
Memory Crane draft
Original Entryway draft
Clamoring Claws draft
Memory Crane
Original Entryway
Clamoring Claws
Process
Combine all epic and intimate environments to construct the city. The final presentation is a tour the different components of the city. How do the people function? Where do they live, where do they eat, how do they communicate? Is there gravity in this city? Is there a government system running this city? Create a narrative around these and many more ideas to bring the many visual components of the city to life.
BrainGarden
In 2080, Earth is no longer suitable for survival, and all human beings take the spacecraft called BrainGarden for the continuity of human civilization. To save energy, human beings are allocated and frozen in cells, while their brains are connected to a virtual world system. The entire spacecraft is controlled and piloted by an AI system called BIG EYE.
Because of the compression of living space, human memory has become a very precious asset and an important document for the continuation of human civilization. So BIG EYE established a library for storing memory. Humans need to hand in a certain number of memory fragments every month, and every human’s memory will be held in an exterior physical storage structure ROM.
In order to optimize human civilization, BIG EYE regularly screens some memory fragments that have strong value and are conducive to the development of human society. Through cell connection devices, they are implanted in human brains without any perception.
Under such conditions, the development of human society is indeed getting stronger and stronger, but for the entire human civilization, mankind must abandon the right for free development, while autonomous personality unconsciously dissipates. As the controller of the entire BrainGarden, BIG EYE has unknowingly become the controller of human civilization in the process of distributing memories. Every action of mankind is completely obeyed by the arrangements of BIG EYE. The entire human society is like a code constantly iterating.
For the continuation of human civilization, every newborn will be allocated memory fragments by BIG EYE to ensure that newborns can fill social vacancies in the future. The gender of each newborn and the memory that needs to be allocated have sophisticated algorithms. Human beings cannot control it by themselves, nor do they have the right to do it.
The cell is not only an existing human life warehouse, but also an artificial uterus. All reproductive processes are completed in the cell to ensure that BIG EYE can control everything.
