The Infinite Fun Palace by Sofia Kanarelli

Short Description:

This architectural film project explores the impact of 21st century information technologies on the way we experience our cities and perceive space. Spatial practices of today’s augmented inhabitants demolish traditional architectonic boundaries of actual space and give them freedom to virtually manipulate their experiences through various ambiances.
This film attempts to raise questions concerning future spatial organisation and materiality of spaces we are called to design, and start a conversation about the role of the architect in a world that is radically changing.

Full Description:

The film starts in Canary Wharf, an area that represents the metropolis of the 21st century, where everything is seen as calculable and quantifiable data. Architectural spaces no longer derive from the dynamics between needs and means but have become mediums through which political and financial power is demonstrated and materialized. An urban landscape that is seen as a capitalist product of institutions of power where humans feel disoriented, peripheralised, and lost.
This new type of space was central in Fredric Jameson’s work in his book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In 1984, following his passage through the Bonaventure Hotel, he wrote:

'' I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet posses the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore--like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks--stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.''

Today by simply holding a smart device in our hands we have augmented our everyday experiences and it could be argued that the virtual expansion of our actual reach comes as a response to Jameson’s ‘imperative to grow new organs’ -a new perceptual equipment to match these mutated spaces of late capitalism. But to feel lost in the city today does not only have to do with our inability to physically orientate ourselves in a complex urban network. There is a new sense of being lost in space that is associated with our weakness to define our positions between the actual world we physically inhabit and the virtual network we digitally practice.

Even though the nature of our cities is transformed into a hybrid, still the urban landscape we inhabit is first and foremost a psychological space that is altered according to each inhabitant’s perception. Space is never absolute but a collection of subjective experiences that are fundamentally affected today by the use of information technologies. Our augmented everyday lives create new perceptions of space that lead to new urban situations. Each inhabitant has the freedom to virtually manipulate his actual experience of the urban environment and has transformed himself into a new social subject that operates in two parallel worlds.

Our augmented bodies that cross traditional borders of materiality, are expanded in multiple dimensions - the movement of the body leaves a trace both in space and time, as well as a trace of information. This multidimensional body is explored as abstract geometry that along with information of space as notation system and geometry of space as point cloud data, create a new space of interaction: Synthetic Space.

This film tries to highlight the way in which our everyday augmented spatial practices blur boundaries between actual cities and virtual networks and attempts to redefine the concept of the city of the 21st century.

Techniques:

Actual geometry of space is explored through its 21st Century representational information- the point cloud data. University of Greenwich provided latest equipment in order to 3D laser scan the areas of interest.

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City was used as a guide to cognitively map my experience of Greenwich and abstract actual space to a level of notation.

One of the aims of this project was to explore space and bodies in space through latest technologies and techniques. Inspired by Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs that captured body movement through time, 3D motion capture techniques were used for this film in order to capture body movement, simulate it in 3D environment and generate abstract geometry.

* This film was developed as part of the MArch course at the University of Greenwich, in Unit 15. Film production was supervised by Nic Clear.