Embedded Project, Shanghai

This temporary, interactive installation was based on the concept of ‘complex systems’ which can observe, perceive and research our living world, society and biology. Virtual architecture is embedded into various cities and regions within Google Earth projected onto the floor, within the internal space of the installation. Motion sensors track the movement of the audience within the internal space, and the projectors respond according to these inputs. By using this interactive technology, members of the audience can trigger and control the projected scene by changing the displacement of their own body or altering the distance between each other within the projective regions. The audiences are provided with unusual perspectives to view the globe, our city, open fields, as well as the algorithmic architectures embedded into the Google Earth projection. 

This system establishes an evident but uncertain logical relationship between the movement of people, visual experience and “urban messages”. The audience can observe the process of urban change within the projection.

The faces of the box were designed using a recursion algorithm, based upon a triangular fractal pattern. Each triangle is sub-divided or ‘cracked’ again and again to create smaller and smaller triangles and a denser pattern. At each stage, two out of the three segments are cracked, so that one large segment remains intact to create variation in scale across the surface. At each cracking, the new triangles are raised, perpendicularly by 12cm to create the three-dimensional, surface pattern on the faces of the installation. Abandoning traditional architectural design methodology and using this computational algorithm, the artists (architects) seek to challenge the traditional top-down design method. Connecting the logic of the algorithm and its execution process with physical architecture can generate unexpected results. To visualize these results, the generated digital data (the three-dimensional architectural models) are embedded into the Google Earth projections. Hence the installation design is virtually-embedded within its own physical, architectural manifestation.