perfect.city

The South Korean city of Songdo, a planned international metropolis developed by corporations (Gale International, with a technological infrastructure by Microsoft), is slated for completion in 2015. The city is designed to be perfect: plans call for the elimination of social ills, care-free living, and induced happiness for all citizens, atop a giant landfill south of Seoul. Ubiquitous technology is a central tenet of the planned infrastructure, but concerns over an all-knowing, Big Brother style society have been raised. As a corporate venture, public space will be privatized. What effect will this have on people’s private lives? “We will build in all this functionality,” answers Catherine Maras, Microsoft’s Director of Worldwide E-Government who is involved in the Songdo project. “Really it’s opt-in or opt-out. Whatever the citizens want to make their lives easier.” 

Songdo is not the first Utopian city—Brasilia is one of many another examples, which at its completion in 1960 promised a utopian experience of a redesigned city specifically for the modern lifestyle. Inevitably, utopian visions are met with the mundane realities of living inside these ‘golden dreams’. Today, Brasiliense families manifest their rejections of utopian design by reasserting familiar values, concepts and conventions of urban life. Songdo may function in a similar pattern.

PERFECT.CITY is a 2-channel video installation consisting of a large double-sided projection screen.

One side of the screen alternates between live-action footage of the artist recreating the design process of the city, scrubbing backwards and forwards through time, mixed with a time-lapse recording of the planning and construction of the virtual city. This video component mimics a documentary style look at “the making of” New Songdo.

On the opposite screen is a slow motion animation, using the popular SIM City software, of a population wandering aimlessly amongst cold, bland and featureless urban street-scapes. This future city is unattached to history and the somnambulist pedestrians point to the weary, stale, and unprofitable experience of techno-utopianism.The featureless city streets depicted call into question the all too brief period and limited input from non-corporate entities devoted to planning the city.

In PERFECT.CITY I explore the use of technology in everyday settings and how it both reflects and creates phenomenological experiences. These experiences are interdependent, symbiotic and create meaning in a mutual fashion. In depicting the role of ‘planner and developer’ in PERFECT.CITY, I embody and perform the process of creating utopic visions, where dreams pass into action and back again. Though these cycles are complex, the work minimizes the aesthetics to feature the beauty of the mundane: both on the programming side, and within the everyday life that a future utopia would present.