What Illuminates The City?What Illuminates The City? Video installation, acrylic, white board, mirror acrylic, 2019, The installation of the projection-mapping project is two different pieces of work merged together. One element is a nine-inch cube container with sixty-four two-inch cubes stacked within the structure. Some of the cubes are empty, some have more complex interior structures, and some have black-and-white urban fragments. The overall theme speaks to the phantom-like structure Virilio used to describe our contemporary city, as well as Han’s description on how the smooth and transparent reshape our surroundings. I see this project more like a poetic portrait of the city, with the city representing the generalization of urbanism, such as glass-box architecture. The piece revolves around the transparency of the city; it seems clear from the outside but the activities within remain invisible until the light shines through the structure and casts a false reality on the wall. The projection includes rotoscoped videos of browsing different Google Alert results, animations of fake shadows, and videos of snow cube movement. The installation invites viewers to consider the question: is it the structure of the city that illuminates a false reality, or the shadow that illuminates what we call a city? |