Manic Metropolis

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.

These changes are caused by a vast spectrum of acts, 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.

The infinite number of these apparently miniscule and isolated occurrences, when viewed through a broader, more objective lens, 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 and 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. By bringing these 3D scans into modeling and animation softwares, I can freely change the characteristics of these occurrences and edit them to shift the boundaries of their meanings and uses, creating a language that is based in our urban contexts but extending far beyond the restrictions and rigidity of the physical.

Nush Wadia

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Nush Wadia

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