Overlapping Cities
Yinglu Ma
Description:
Overlapping Cities is a digital video installation that uses the riverscape as a field to propose and document a new type of urban drift, interweaving memory and reality in the form of footstep maps, in order to create urban connections and mutual interpretations between cities.
Project Aims:
The aim of Overlapping Cities is to address the question of ‘How cities connect and interpret each other?’ As Marco Polo said in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, "Everytime I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” This memory-triggered association, which everyone has, gives people the ability to interpret one city in terms of another. In this project, I aim to help people who have lived in different cities find overlapping shades when they come to a new city. I intend to use the river as a starting point to create a new type of urban drift, overlapping maps and real landscapes of two cities. By exchanging maps to roam around the city, I create memory connections and urban connections, building a thousand internal forms into an external structure.
Technical Summary:
Overlapping Cities is a three-channel video installation that combines projection and an immersive experience in a dark environment.
Some parts of the video in the work are microphotography shots. I mounted a toy lens on the camera to create a blurred, psychedelic effect. I wanted to convey that it is not necessary to look at the city from a serious point of view, nor to see and interpret an object exactly, which means it is, but it can also not be. The viewer can thus think of it as a kind of uncertain and unstable sensory drift. Other parts of the video are computer generated, using Touchdesigner, Max/Msp and 3D scanning. I simulated the movement of the microcosm by building nodes. In those moving images, the pulsation of particles and the flow of light are visual presentations that generate vitality.
As for poetry, I recorded the objects I encountered during my walk, transforming them into imagery, words and phrases. Then I built a poetry generator in Max/Msp, in which all the imagery randomly appears, rotates and morphs. Eventually, the superimposed imagery was combined to produce three poems which represent a random city of uncertainty. This corresponds to the "assemblage" theory, which describes machines, gears, motors and other flowing components that at some point intermingle to form a statement, constantly interpenetrating and changing position.
In terms of the development of the project, I'm trying to add more interaction with the audience such as performances or workshops, which may simulate a road, with objects, images and phrases placed around them. The audience can pick them up as they walk the path and place them in random combinations at the end to form their own poems and cities.
Concept Summary:
Overlapping Cities explores the memory connection and the way cities interpret each other. For this purpose, I searched for some urban memories that we all have in common and found that memories of the river are always similar, just as water from all over the world meet. So I engaged in a collaboration with an artist in Beijing for a new type of urban drift. Over the lifetime of people, they continue to split from City 1 and intermingled with City 2, in a continuous loop, where the environment and landscape became a vehicle for emotion and time. To some extent, the way we experience and interpret is always influenced by previous experiences and pre-existing beliefs. This project discuss those association between cities, which allows us to find familiar shadows in new environments, giving new cities a special meaning through past experiences.
Inspired by Dérive and Situationist International, I search for a way of walking that interprets one city in terms of another, focusing on the relationship between the wanderer and a particular space. This kind of walking is different from a mere stroll. The wanderer needs to tap into the combined effects of space, place and memory on moods and states so as to explore the external landscape according to the inner form. The landscapes at this point are fluid and overlapping. Language also takes up a significant part. When recounting memories, we tend to describe the picture in our minds through language. Memory is inaccurate, and so is language. And this uncertainty and small deviations construct many external spaces built by language.
In this project, I continue with Henri Lefebvre's theory of Social Produced of Space and intend for the audience to experience representations of space (conceived space) and representational space (lived space). The maps, as representations of space, are not fixed, but change as they overlap. At the same time, the audience can construct new spaces in addition to the two cities through overlapping, thus creating a private representational space.
This project gives us a new method of interpreting the city and a new way of drifting through the city. The river is the most representative location, full of metaphors and symbols. It is the collective consciousness of stretches. Through a number of behaviors in this project, the broadly similar internal space is transformed into an identification with an external entity.
Bibliography
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. 20-38. Duke University Press.
Lefebvre, H., & Nicholson-Smith, D. (2017). The production of space. 38-59. Blackwell.
Nicholas Crane (2018). You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World. 49-63. Weidenfeld & Nicolson Press.
Lucia Pietroiusti (2019), Caroline Smith. Sun and Sea(Marina). Lithuania, Italy,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeCek-KVKP4.
Simon Starling (2003). ISLAND FOR WEEDS. Barbican Art Gallery, London.
Taloi Havini (2020). Habitat. Reclamation, Artspace, Sydney.