The Emergent City. A Life From Complexity to The City of Bits.
The Emergent City, 2010 – 2104, misc. electronics.
The Emergent City. A Life From Complexity to The City of Bits.
A Mini, Mechanical Metropolis Runs On Real-Time Urban Data
The artwork captures the changes over time in the environment (city) and represents the changing life and complexity of space as an emergent artwork. The artwork explores new ways of thinking about life, emergence and interaction within public space.The project uses environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies, to question audiences’ experiences of real time events and create visualizations of life as it unfolds. The installation goes beyond simple single user interaction to monitor and survey in real time the whole city and entirely represent the complexities of the real time city as a shifting morphing complex system.
The data and their interactions – that is, the events occurring in the environment that surrounds and envelops the installation – are translated into the force that brings the electronic city to life by causing movement and change – that is, new events and actions – to occur. In this way the city performs itself in real time through its physical avatar or electronic double: The city performs itself through an-other city.
Cause and effect become apparent in a discreet, intuitive manner, when certain events that occur in the real city cause certain other events to occur in its completely different, but seamlessly incorporated, double. The avatar city is not only controlled by the real city in terms of its function and operation, but also utterly dependent upon it for its existence.
This installation consists of:
• The Emergent City: capture of real time environmental data changes – (sculpture software and custom electronics)
• City of Bits: silver city – (sculpture(
• Complexity: urban maps – paintings and custom software system
• Surveillance Space: CCTV feeds of visitors’ movement – custom electronics
• Synchronicity: visualisation of live London transport data (app)
• Diversity: software systems
• BODY
• Sonicity
The Emergent City is an “Open social sculpture that informs the world and creates new meaningful artistic experiences. The artwork is also a highly technical project that gives vast amounts of information about the environment. By embedding the sensors like this we can re-engage with the fabric of space itself and enable new artistic metaphors within the environment.”
Stanza is an internationally recognised artist, who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards including:- Vidalife 6.0 First Prize. SeNef Grand Prix. Videobrasil First Prize. Stanzas art has also been rewarded with a prestigious Nesta Dreamtime Award, an Arts Humanities Creative Fellowship and a Clarks bursary award.
His artworks have been exhibited with over fifty exhibitions globally. Participating venues have included :- Venice Biennale: Victoria Albert Museum: Tate Britain: Mundo Urbano Madrid: New Forest Pavilion Artsway: State Museum, Novorsibirsk. Biennale of Sydney, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico: Plymouth Arts Centre: ICA London: Sao Paulo Biennale:
Stanza is an expert in arts technology, CCTV, online networks, touch screens, environmental sensors, and interactive artworks. Stanza’s artworks explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments.
Recurring themes throughout his career include the urban landscape, surveillance culture, privacy and alienation in the city. Stanza is interested in the patterns we leave behind as well real time networked events that can be re-imagined and sourced for information. Stanza uses multiple new technologies to create distances between real time multi point perspectives that emphasis a new visual space. The purpose of this is to communicate feelings and emotions that we encounter daily which impact on our lives and which are outside our control.
Educated in fine art at Goldsmiths College in the early eighties he later went on to study at Greenwich University and Central Saint Martins Art College London. Stanza returned to Goldsmiths College as a AHRC arts research fellow. He is a pioneer of net art and was one of the first to use internet art as a medium.
