Artists Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain and the Whitney Museum of American Art have collaborated to produce New York Apartment 2020, a mesmerizing website experience that "advertises a fictitious New York City apartment for sale that covers more than 300 million square feet and spans the five boroughs."
The piece, which exists as an interactive website, combines thousands of real estate listings into one massive aggregated apartment that features 65,764 bedrooms and 55,588 bathrooms. The mega-apartment clocks in at a cozy 36,672,535 square feet in size.
According to project text showcased on the Whitney Museum website, the artwork "collapses the high and low ends of the market, architectural periods and styles, and neighborhoods and affordability into a single space that cumulatively creates a portrait of New York's living spaces and the real estate market."
For the project, the artists scraped real estate listings off of the internet, a research endeavor that also generated a wide variety of floor plans, which the artists have collected into massive 3D models aggregating these living spaces into a giant collection of walls and rooms. In some versions of the aggregation, the units are laid out on a horizontal plane, creating a nearly endless collection of rooms, closets, bathrooms, and kitchens. In other visualizations, the apartments are stacked vertically to create an apartment tower that reaches into the heavens. Other visualizations offer distorted and sometimes bizarre configurations.
Throughout the website, one can find photos from the various real estate listings, as well as marketing videos and other visualizations guiding potential occupants through the spaces.
The website is part of The Whitney's Artport initiative, "portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art" initially launched in 2001.
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