Skip to main content

A City in Motion

Support Provided By
D-FUSE.jpg

I'm currently in the city of Doha in Qatar, one of the Arab emirates located along the Arabian Peninsula. Two days ago, to much fanfare, Qatar was awarded the FIFA World Cup. This was big news because no Arab country has previously hosted the soccer event, and winning the bid puts the small country in the spotlight. Being here, I can't help but imagine the changes to come as the quiet city transforms itself to welcome 300,000 rowdy, beer-loving fans. Qatar will build hundreds of new hotels, a mass transit system, new stadiums and more. The city, which has already been dramatically transformed in the last few years and is dotted with towering cranes and piles and piles of building supplies, feels very much like a generative artwork as it springs up out of the desert, brand new but still connected to its historical spirituality and traditions (I can hear the afternoon call to prayer right now). The pace of the development calls to mind the spate of recent artworks by digital artists that picture the transformations of urban space.In Brilliant City, for example, the collective known as D-Fuse examines an area in northern Shanghai, finding patterns, visual rhythms and sonic symphonies in the densely populated area filled with high-rises and the noisy equipment of daily urban life.

#1 Brilliant City from D-Fuse on Vimeo.

Quayola's short visual work Cityscan depicts the transformation of urban spaces in a more kaleidoscopic manner, as if you're riding on a short-circuiting elevator flipped on its side in the middle of a city.

Scalable_City.jpg

And in Scalable City,a project by Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab from 2008, satellite imagery of Southern California is mapped, then made algorithmic and three-dimensional; a road system is added; and this is combined with the landscape to produce a topography across which beautiful and orderly pathways appear, buildings shatter and reconfigure, and the world appears as fragmented gamespace.In each of these videos, the city exists as a hybrid space melding real and generative, a space where architecture, computation and media collide. The videos result - technically - from the mash-up, but they also illustrate it, merging form and content. If you could capture Doha's upcoming decade-long transformation as a time-lapse morph, would it resemble these videos?

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.