Lampsacus. a new interactive piece on cities formation by andré sier. cyberspace & greek antiquity. these have been my thoughts throughout a 3 week residency @engageLab in the @CCG building of minho university (UM).
Lampsacus: greek city topologies of the unknown meet the free internet, the city of fluxes.
thanks to cultivamos cultura association i've been delving deep in the meanders of 2 key concepts for a new installation about to premiere in 16th june for Emergências 2012 exhibition, at guimarães 2012 capital of culture. thanks to Marta de Menezes and Catarina Cerdeira and also to all engageLab crew that were kind enough to accompany my work throughout these times (Pedro Branco, João Pedro, Sérgio, Marta, Clarissa, Pedro, and more mtad students giving nice feedback throughout the building process).
key concepts for the creation of this piece Lampsacus are: greek topologies of the unknown, where ancient greece periphery cities meet contemporary greece (somewhere around the origins of synthetic geometry); and Otto Rössler's seminal concept of Lampsacus, a free internet based society, in the midst of all computer chaos laying around, the bomb, the free internet, the city of fluxes where we are all from and birthed.
first final version got presented at a tice workshop by ccg/um during 29th march.
Lampsacus was built in c++ using openframeworks. features computer vision tracking which controls spatial navigation and interactivity to the simulation. the space is occupied with autonomous agents which dynamically build and destroy city areas surrounding a central control tower which keeps visual information of the coming human visitors as well as organizing space on the fly.
Lampsacus é uma cidade jogável. Um ambiente visual interactivo onde se recria uma cidade virtual, modificável, habitada pelos seus visitantes humanos, no espaço da instalação, bem como por agentes computacionais residentes no espaço tridimensional. Nesta cidade virtual procura-se um desiquilíbrio dinâmico que induza a mudança, um crescimento espontâneo, interactivo, por parte dos cidadãos que a habitam e a visitam, de uma forma lúdica.
Lampsacus is a playable city. A visual interactive environment where a virtual city is recreated, modifiable, inhabited by its human visitors, in the installation space, as well as resident computational agents in the three dimensional space. In this virtual city it is sough a dynamic unbalance that induces change, spontaneous interactive growth, by the citizens that inhabit and visit it, in a ludical way.
[ update: ] a nice interview about this piece & more here (only #pt). thanks again, Nelson!
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Lampsacus - residency @um from Andre Sier on Vimeo.