We have been invited to participate in the SPOTS ON SCHOOLS exhibition in Italy and to represent Clemson University among a group of schools internationally in this event that is part of BEYOND MEDIA, 9th international festival for architecture and media in Florence, Italy. The event, which includes workshops, lectures, exhibits and debates, offers “an exploration, on an international basis, of state-of-the-art and cutting edge researches.” The theme of this event is Visions, as a vehicle for reflecting on “topics of figuration and representation” as a way to “put forward more effective visions which might be useful in tracing the outlines of our possible future.”
In order to envision future possibilities, we must perform thorough studies of our cities as living systems within an urban ecology filtering, transmitting, generating, changing, evolving.
The site of your next project will be the exhibit space in Stazione Leopolda in Florence, the space of the SPOTS ON SCHOOLS exhibit. You are to perform a CT- scan of Florence and visualize this city within a dark space of between 9 sqm to 18 sqm of concentrated exchange and interaction. The living body under analysis is the city of Florence during the week of the exhibit, July 9 – 17.
Our installation will be ephemeral, lasting just one week. How can the life of the city be scaled to fit the exhibition space and transmit something about the life going on outside, inside… how can we use contemporary visualization and mapping tools to “see” Florence much the same way a a CT-scan allows us to see the body in real-time…. blood flow, etc.
What is the procedure for visualizing the inner workings of this body under analysis and what is the relationship of the human cycles and activities to that and as part of that larger intricate system that it occupies, uses and adjusts?
What visions for the future possibilities emerge out of these revelations?
You are to pick up from where we left of with our discussions in seminar and in studio of Urban CT-scan: The City as Body(ies) in Movement and to use this opportunity in Florence, Italy of mapping and building, experiencing and analyzing, observing and sharing for exploring future visions for “reading” and “writing” our cities which engage and understand the city and our bodies as an interconnected living organism. You are to exploit the tools at our disposal and the existing infrastructure of the city in imaginative, witty, and sensible manners.
What role does the city’s existing infrastructure play in the set up of the equipment for scanning? How do you both engage and reveal the cycles of its inhabitants in that set up? What is the visionary potential of the visualization tools at our disposal? How do you scan a city? How do you scan this city in particular? You are to take advantage of the exactitude of information revealed by some of these tools (such as GPS) and in the experiential, empirical understanding acquired by others (such as A/V).
Can this project explore the potentials at hand to take what Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge were doing in the 1800s with chronophotography and what Frank Gilbreth was doing with chronocyclegraph in the early 1900s to the scale of the collective?
Can this document (a vision) reveal the intimate interconnectivity of our bodies to that of the city to help better adjust gently to that built environment that we change and affect daily. Can we more effectively be part of a working and balanced ecology. What is the potential of this? Is this healthy and is it important? How does the visualization of Florence within the space of Leopolda affect the city itself and how does the city affect its mapping?
The installation within the space at Leopolda, a mapping of the city, a CT-scan should serve as an interactive platform for participatory collective diagnosis and discussions to emerge, occur, begin… during the time of the exhibit, and to serve as a space for visions of possibilities to sharpen, to come into focus, to exist even for just a moment. … a vision, visions to exist.
Beyond Media, Visions. July 9 - 17 Florence, Italy
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