Imaginary Forces
’ Peter Frankfurt Collaborates with Greg Lynn/FORM and Alex McDowell to create New City for MoMA... (photos and video after jump)
The installation, which is part of MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind show, represents a virtual world conceived by the architect, I.F. co-founder, and the production designer.
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Teaser/Construction
MoMA describes “Design and the Elastic Mind” as a show that “focuses on designers'
ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores,
changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.” According to
the New York Times, the show is “as revolutionary in its own way as MoMA’s ‘Machine Art’ exhibition of 1934.” It was organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator of the
Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and runs through May 12, 2008.
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New City Mosaic Film. Click here to download hi-res version (217mb, .mov)
Visitors to “Design and the Elastic Mind” will experience New City in what looks like
a three-sided geodesic dome, surrounded by a mosaic of screens. In this immersive environment they’ll be able to experience a seven-minute film, produced by
Imaginary Forces, that is rear-projected onto the interlocking screens, which fit together like a mosaic.
“What’s on display at MoMA can be described as the world’s grooviest napkin
sketch,” says Frankfurt, who led the I.F. team on the project. “It’s a multimedia
experience describing what New City could really be, which is the first architecturally-considered virtual environment.”
View more still frame shots in the Gallery
On a more practical level, Frankfurt describes New City as a place where the world’s
leading architects, planners or designers could erect structures and experiment with
urban designs that couldn’t possibly exist. “It becomes a very interesting space to
showcase thinking and work that may not be doable in the actual world,” he says.
Surrounded by the moving images, sounds and lights of the exhibit, New City is
meant to overwhelm its audience with the vastness and imagination of its premise.
The total effect, according to its creators, is to create for audiences “a very smart
and probing look at what virtual space could be,” says McDowell.
The opportunity for I.F., Lynn and McDowell to collaborate on New City was serendipitous. Frankfurt has toyed with the idea of converging the studio’s work in experience design with its work designing virtual worlds for such companies at MTV and
Coca-Cola. “I was interested in trying to build out a small prototype with the idea
that we would use a museum or gallery as a kind of pedestal to put it on, and
where we would get different kinds of audiences to see it,” he explains.
An opportunity to actually achieve this arose last year, when Antonelli asked Frankfurt to team with Lynn and McDowell to create a piece for the Elastic Mind show.
The studio has previously collaborated with both designers on a variety of projects,
working with the former on designs and media installations for the Grimaldi Forum
in Monaco, and with the latter on the gestural interfaces seen in Steven Spielberg’s
Minority Report.
“What we’ve always done before is try to get the media component integrated into
the spatial experience,” explains Lynn of his previous experience design work with
Imaginary Forces. “What’s different here is that we’ve never indulged ourselves in
a topic which is a one hundred percent virtual media experience.”
Adds McDowell, “New City is an opportunity for the first time to use architecture
and environment to stimulate not only narrative and storytelling, but to actually
look at an equivalent of how a city might develop in the real world, and how you
explore the equivalency for that in the virtual world.”
“This is a really interesting way to be in this world from a different perspective,”
Frankfurt continues about the project. “We’re really talking about the implications
for design and architecture, for information and visualization, or for narrative. The
most compelling aspect of this—and the thing that makes me most excited about
it—is that everyone I’ve talked to about it wants to get involved, they want to know
more. And that ranges from filmmakers to designers to technologists to planners—
they all see the possibilities of doing things in New City.”
Frankfurt adds that the rendition of New City currently on display at MoMA is just
the first phase of the studio’s plans to develop the concept as a more robust platform, and to invite more experimentation and innovation. “This is really just the
beginning of the conversation about New City, not the conversation itself,” he says.
“It’s really meant to be as much of an invitation as it is a provocation.”
23 Comments
man, I wish Imaginary Forces did my presentation animations...
that was retarded
If you are anywhere near NYC, go to MoMA and see this exhibit. The show as a whole will make your head explode, and this is one of the coolest things in it.
It's a totally overwhelming experience, the screens wrap around you to put you in this (almost) completely abstract environment.
Makes a nice contrast to the ambient/interactive/augmented reality stuff that makes up the rest of the show. This is like a return to, and a reminder of the original promise of Old-School Cyberspace Virtual Reality.
Do we get to wear those cool VR helmets and glasses? I kind of agree with clamdiver - a little too much fancy graphics.
ok - Ill admit I havent seen it in person - the 3d wovens look cool. The VR "fantasy" worlds though - good god I thought we were way beyond that by now.
so there is no gravity or lateral forces in new city? Cool!
I just wish that my buildings didn't need to stand up or accommodate any systems, vertical transportation, or people too!
Yes, evilP, because progress in architecture and culture is one dimensional and once something's been 'done' we all collectively move on and do something even newer and cooler, right?
Yeah, Cyberspace is done because we have, what, Second Life? This New City project is great because it gets away from the stupid conventional real-world cliches like gabled roofs. Here, I would question the default look of those skyscrapers (are those roof top units and vent stacks?), but at this scale, who cares? You've got to put placeholders at some point when you're making a whole world up from scratch. Which is another question: how much of this is top-down, and how much is procedurally generated? Did they model every block?
Anyway, I think the Real (Real-Real) world is big enough for Augmented Reality, Alternate Reality, Virtual Reality, and whatever else gets cooked up.
"You've got to put placeholders at some point when you're making a whole world up from scratch"
This falls into the realm of fiction and literature - hence postmodern thought. Fantasy architecture like woods and this stuff seems like architectural van art - which is still cool dont get me wrong - but hardly architectural.
in the future no one will need architecture. the second life will be your real world. your only association with the physically inhabited world will be to earn the money to support your second life and eventually most of that economic structure will migrate to the second life. so, the self congratulatory masturbatothon of architectural form will have its place in the world of the unreal which is becoming everincreasingly real.
i am 99% on board with evilplatypus. the only part i would change is that i would say this is way less cool than van art because it calls itself "new," while being wholly predictable. give me a frazetta warrior princess riding a saber-toothed tiger or an aztec virgin sacrifice any day!
i would rather live say in the casablanca of the movies. i could be a waiter. i could be a vichy policeman, i could be a loose woman who sleeps with inspector renault, i could be sam's piano tuner, so much better than what im doing now.
what about stevie nicks riding a unicorn while being sprinkled by dust from a Wizard's staff
BOING!
yeah u could be stevie's coke spoon and ride in a spacecar!
Whatever, I think its cool.
Then again, if you ask me I think the world's cities have already converged into a semi-continuous whole thanks largely to the information age.
I think the video poses questions that it's visuals can't really address, except for in the moments when some of the imagery resembles the stuff you see on infosethetics. The rest of it is either in relation(acceptance/defiance) to the visual constraints of our reality, not that of the virtual media/condition. I'm really interested to see where it could go.
I think it is new. I think there are moments in the movie that are unlike I've seen anywhere, and that's exciting. Sure, there some default palceholders, and some VR cliches, but damn few.
It does remind of Lebbeus's own New City project, which was fodder for tons of architects and scifi movies that followed. I hope, if anything, this leads to more abstract, truly new scifi.
How are you guys so conservative that you're knee jerk against stuff like this even when it says it's purely virtual and formal right from the start?
I <3 typos!
Sevensixfive- right on! I think the mere fact that interesting architects are getting to build real buildings nowadays is slowly starting to create an architecture culture, especially in schools, that does not see fantasy, imagination and speculation as a part of the discipline. The limit to architectural invention is not the crap that goes up in China or Dubai, those are things that somebody is willing to pay for, for everything else there's the computer and the drawing board! on the other hand, i wouldn't mind seeing a more ambitious set of forms from a dude who named his firm GLForm.
form for forms sake leads to nihiilsm. that's camus talking not me.
My main issue with this (not having been there) is the nature of the speculation itself.
I completely agree with you GO ARCHITECTS, that a heavy dose of fiction and imagination would be an extremely provocative and fruitful addition to contemporary architecture; but like much of the digital/new technology work that's labeled visionary recently, very little of it ever seems to rise above creative representation.
If New City is the beginnings of a virtual world, why do the designs seem to be flat representations of three-dimensional space?
The work is provocative because it shows us creative manifestations of the common physical world, which is fine I suppose, but hardly visionary.
The opportunity that was available here, that I personally think is a necessary step that needs to be taken, is for architects to face head-on what the implications of spatiality really mean in these digital environments. Stop imposing three dimensions on dimensionless space, stop expressing "our information age connectivity" in bright pink 3D infodiagrams and really try to get to the bottom of how we (human beings) navigate these types of environments, and how we use these environments to provide our lives with meaning.
(Personal opinion) we need to get our foot in the door of these digital environments through human values, that’s always been the link from one era to the next, not form.
Otherwise it's just a big budget Hollywood science-fiction movie, entertaining and creative, but underwhelming at providing a meaningful contribution to the discourse.
Right on, c.g. Couldn't agree more.
Especially:
"Stop imposing three dimensions on dimensionless space, stop expressing "our information age connectivity" in bright pink 3D infodiagrams and really try to get to the bottom of how we (human beings) navigate these types of environments, and how we use these environments to provide our lives with meaning."
But I also like form for form's sake, too. Vado, it doesn't have to be an either/or kind of thing, tell Camus when you see him!
The only interesting Lynn's done in a while ....
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