For those living in present times, the promise of the ‘future city’ is imagined as a special place designed to eliminate social ills, provide care-free living, and induce happiness for all. Yet time and time again, the utopian visions of future thinkers are met with the mundane realities of living inside these ‘golden dreams.’ Ubiquitous computing is here, but it remains a controversial idea that could foster an all-knowing, Big Brother style society. The vision for new cities such as the constructed Songdo City include luxuries aimed at catering to citizen’s needs and whims as well as offering peace of mind. In this case, the world of the possible has much more of a draw than the world of the actual.

Songdo is not the first utopian city—Brasilia is one example, which at its completion in 1960 promised a utopian urban experience with almost no imperfections. Today, Brasiliense families manifest their rejections of utopian design by reasserting familiar values, conceptions, and conventions of urban life. Songdo, scheduled for completion in 2015, will likely function in a similar pattern.

It is not every day that a corporation has the carte blanche opportunity to design a city from the ground up. The developer is Gale International, and the technological infrastructural designer is Microsoft. Thus, the city is a corporate venture which not only privatizes public space, but private lives. Questions have been asked such as, “So will it be the sort of place where the authorities will know instantly if you don’t recycle your drinks can? “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.”

In my work I explore the ways in which everyday experiences of technology reflect, or create, phenomenological experiences. Experiences with technology are interdependent and symbiotic, creating meaning in a mutual fashion. In making a PERFECT.CITY, I embody and perform the utopian visions of both urban space and notions of technological progress that are always bound to historic periods of innovation, 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.

PERFECT.CITY is an installation consisting of a large double-sided video projection of SIMS machinima and live action.

On one side of the large hanging screen, I perform as a representative from Gale International and Microsoft and recreate the design process of the city backwards and forwards through time. As I research and plan, the video takes on a kind of documentary of the making and placing of digital files in the planning of Songdo city in The Sims 3. The video offers a time-lapse massive recording of the planning and construction of the virtual city in fast-forward on one wall. The performance of “speed coding” is also a part of this work as the constructed vantage point is shown in present, past, and future all together.

On the opposite projection field, extreme slow motion close-ups of corners and peasantries and perfectness of the fabled future city transform time relative to our everyday experiences. Each video runs a total of 23 minutes.

The scenes are blank, boring, and unimaginative. The future city is a sonambulist, unattached to no history, unless one looks to the site itself, a 1376-acre piece built on a landfill “about the size of midtown Manhattan.” Commonplace scenes such as people walking by and pointless pedestrians point to the weary, stale, and unprofitable experience of techno-utopianism. The video offers viewers a space within a space, a utopia that contains continuous, everyday interactions that point to the imagined space of a utopian planning endeavor as more real than the actual environment the planning process will create. This spectacle of idealistic delirium comments on the never-ending need for people to fail to see the amazing things around them and celebrate them. “To hear planner John B. Hynes tell it, the rise of New Songdo City will be as dramatic as the resurfacing of Atlantis” (Poire 2004).

The Machinima work calls into question the imagined, constructed nature of this and other simulations and cities, and the short time used in decision making and modeling, which results in perhaps oversimplified rulesets and interactions. The character’s dull interactions become one of many datapoints in the constructed city.