Imagine a city individually; 
Composite one "megalopolis" group drawing of the city;
Bring the composite city to life.

A group project by
Chenlan Yao, Flora Zhou, Ingrid Yang,
Finley Sun, Linghang Cai, Rue Qian

Individually, my imaginary city is a city of shadows. 

I was largely inspired by Italo Calvino’s “The Invisible City” when building my own understanding of what a city stands for. One of the ideas I took away from is that a city is actually human desire projected into spatial form. 

The evolution of a city follows the change of citizen’s desire. I was fascinated by this idea that the perception of a city is subject to individual point of view. Therefore, the worldview that inform my work is the notion of “worldview” itself, and how our worldviews affect what we see, as well as how citizen’s worldviews influence the evolution of a city.

Each person locating in a specific position (geographically or socially) in the city has a distinct point of view when looking at the city, which projects a subjective image of the city in their own perception.

To me, these images become the shadow of a city, since the presence of the shadow is largely depending on where the loight source is. And the shadow is casted as a unique shape specific to that light source, or point of view. When these shadows are weaved together, a collective subjective image of city emerges.

As a group, our composite city takes the form of multiple layers both physically and digitally. 

Digitally, we portrait the daily life of a citizen  named “Max”: waking up in his room, sending postcards to his friend, transporting from his home community to workplace, hangout with friend after work, and fluidly changing his identity among different communities. By showing Max’s life, we also show the overview and zoomview of what the city is like, its social structure and transportation system etc.

Physically, we printed out our statement and place it underneath the digital projection of the city. Our intention of doing so is related to my earlier exploration of shadows. We would like to curate a experience that is also interactive rather than just showing and receiving. In this case, only when the audience is covering the light of the projection can he see the information hidden underneath.

“Together, we envisioned a city of interspecies inhabitants with minimized human disturbance and maximized plasticity to chanllenge the power structures that enable and aggravate our anthropocentric fantasies and current destructure of the (non) human world.”