Manic Metropolis
(Werking Title)

The city extends far beyond the visual and physical. It is an infinitely complex network of interactions that a variety of stakeholders come together and “perform”. The nature of this performance is bi-directional. The city, its public spaces, and its infrastructure provide a stage for its citizens to collaboratively perform acts that in turn keep the city running, and in doing so, exert change on the stage.

A vast spectrum of acts cause these changes, from basic wear and tear of the infrastructure, to applying stickers on urban furniture, to dumping household waste on the pavements, to graffitiing girders on subway tracks, sometimes several feet above the ground. Through just these few examples we see how these acts are sometimes, sub-conscious and sometimes require great effort to exert.

These may appear to be an infinite number of miniscule and isolated occurrences. However, when viewed through a broader, more objective lens, they are capable of revealing something more telling about the nature of these interactions. By exerting their change upon the city, the populous appropriate parts of the built environment, thereby shifting and softening the rigid form, and by extension the semantics, that the tangible urban fabric often takes on.

What happens when these occurrences are taken out of their physical context, and allowed to exist outside of their constraints? What do they reveal about the nature of these interactions? What are we trying to tell our cities? What are our cities trying to tell us? What can we learn about the way we inhabit our physical spaces and what can we imagine without?

Using nothing but my iPhone and a photogrammetry application, I capture these occurrences and parts of the built environment that I feel express something beyond the visual. This gives me the power to document these occurrences in a more three dimensional, malleable and looser manner than photographic or videographic documentation. Bringing these 3D scans into modeling and animation software, I can freely change the characteristics of these occurrences. I can shift the boundaries of their meanings and uses. By merging, skewing, stretching, stitching, animating and transforming these occurrences, I aim to create a new stage for them that sits between reality and fiction, and between the digital and physical. This allows me to create a familiar yet distant visual language that sparks doubt, and allows us to draw our own meanings and narratives from them.

Nush Wadia

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Nush Wadia

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Contact