Adventures in Architecture

The Hacker Materialization
Broadway, NY, NY

Fourth Year Studio
Critic: Alisa Andresak
Media: Maya

Concept:

Design Scenario: In the year 2012 a new technology is developed which allows one to see, hear, smell, feel and taste digital environments through a direct, digital link to the central nervous system. This technology allows reality to become indistinguishable from digital fantasies.

Hackers seize this new technology and use it to re-materialize themselves in the analog world, through a system of transformable billboards, building façades, and specially designed installation spaces which begin appearing in the city’s colleges and universities along Broadway. The building façades reflect the interactions of people in the virtual reality context- creating a kind of high-tech, voyurism into people’s private online lives. The architectural animations create intriguing juxtapositions between the analog building programme and the digital programming of the facades and environmental installations.

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A hacker may hijack the facade of a snobby upper east side coffee-house to contort as online doctors size up wealthy, “plugged in” patients for cosmetic, plastic surgery. The result, however is not an explicit, video, but rather a an interpretive dance of light through the space.

Another may link the facade of a corperate conglomerate to the online trial of one of their executives as he’s prosecuted for corruption. Literally, the shadows of the actions of one executive would spatially plague this entire office.

Hackers break out of the digital world and hijack the architecture of the real world- creating an abstract environmental communication system; they rematerialize as architectural, urban entities.