[ISEA2024] Paper: Catty Dan Zhang — Interior Cities: Inhabiting Interactive Cityscapes through the Webcam and the Shared Screen

Abstract

Keywords: Interactive Installation, Computational Drawing, Projection Mapping

This paper documents a multimedia interactive installation which explores the networked camera spaces as tools for placemaking. In her article “Towards a Diffuse House”, Anna Puigjaner states that the growing digital sphere has turned “the entirety of the built environment into an endless domestic landscape, one defined less by buildings or public spaces and more by objects and technologies” [1]. Situating an experimental practice in this vast digital sphere, we are aware that physical bodies occupying one actual space at a time but simultaneously existing in –and being connected to– many others through cameras, networks, and screens has become the most iconic reality of the modern city. During recent years, such multiplicity of presence has spurred a cultural shift much more drastically than any has come before. The pivots from situated towards remoteness in social and professional lives urge new definitions of architectural boundary, techno-aesthetics, domesticity, and public space. Designing with webcams, inhabitable screens, domestic archetypes, and daily life activities, the installation reimagines cityscapes as interactive fictions of its citizens from within their personal proximities in the gallery. It invites public engagements when examining the world around publics and individuals through an immersive environment. The project questions what existing architecture and digital media could offer in their radically transformed relationships with social mechanism, humanity, and wellbeing. The paper outlines the conceptual approach, the technical framework, and the spatial strategies of the installation.

  • Catty Dan Zhang is an associate professor of architecture at University of Tennessee Knoxville (USA), and the founder of Temporary Office— award-winning design practice exploring architecture and digital technology through the production of exhibitions, objects, drawings, animations, installations, buildings, and writings. Her work experiments with the multiplicity of techniques and mediums, translating ordinary objects into performative and synergistic systems to visualize and to modulate ephemeral forms. Zhang was a finalist of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021. She was awarded the first prize in the Pamphlet Architecture 37 competition and is the author of the most recent volume in the Pamphlet Architecture series titled “Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids” (Steven Holl Foundation & Station Hill Press, 2023).