Labyrinth City is an interactive virtual world. In this game, action is not conducted by a predefined goal, but it is a drift along an urban mutating space, where the event can assail us at any moment. This is a hypernarrative space where the audience could construct its own story with fragments, situations, and little messages -distributed around structures- making reference to the actuality and nature of public space.
“A space designed for the lyric nomadic drift trough a simulacra succession”.
Note: A first visualization of this work in progress will be availablein the video festival MADATAC# http://www.madatac.es(December 10th to 16th) and Room Art Fair http://www.roomartfair.com/(November 23th to 25th), both
in Madrid.
Labyrinth City Installation – Sandra Álvaro 2014
Author: Sandra Alvaro
Year of creation: 2012-2014
Description: three channel video installation. 3d image and sound mapping
Variable dimensions
The City is the medium where daily life develops. It is the expression of collective creation. In this space the permanent structures of power and planned urbanism coexist with a permanent moving multitude navigating the streets. This population wandering across fluxes and intersections, their encounters and occupations, make the city complex and emergent.
Labyrinth City simulates this emergence on the navigable space of Virtual Reality. Since our conception of life is dynamic, it proposes a drift trajectory (dérive) across malleable architectures. The city understood as a playground.
This city is produced from a set of images. The dataset (paradigm) is constituted by pictures- taken in different cities- showing the physical structures of a city. These textures will shape the walls we will encounter in our path that construct the city. This database is spacialized – giving born to the urban space- by means of a structure (syntagm) that links the images. This structure is a mobile geometry. Several concentric dodecahedrons –including walls and gaps, crossing points- rotate. The randomized stopping of their movement establishes a starting point, a set of paths that can be taken from the center. The structure evolves in all the possible directions on the plane, giving place to a labyrinthine urban space actualized with the movement across of the audience. The complexity and simultaneity is shown by a multichannel installation. Situated in front three screens, the audience could follow the simultaneous paths that evolve from the center after each rotation of the structure. These are three different environments synchronized by means of the sound and the events that transform the structure showing the plasticity of our medium.
The audience becomes a new flâneur, by their navigation it realizes the multiple possibilities of the combination of discrete elements. The space is perceived in the haptic and fragmentary way that characterizes a stroll down the street.
Note: The first exhibition of this installation will be available in the Hong-Gah Museum