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Consuming Places examines the emerging virtual and physical social spaces that are fundamentally changing our urban experiences. Flexible architectural forms and materials, dynamic information visualizations, and autonomous communication networks are shaping creative practices as well as everyday life. In response, Creative Time has invited a distinguished group of architects, artists, and designers to develop works along the Brooklyn Waterfront that defy typical disciplinary boundaries and investigate how public exchanges impact the perceptual experience of our environment. Consuming Places embraces perspectives that accentuate the interplay between technological developments, economic and political systems, and regional geographies to shape civic growth and social exchange. Whether the work suggests a new way to draw monetary worth out of space or capitalizes on the psychological economy of memory and place, these five projects entice you to ascribe meaning and value to social space, urban space -- to space in general.
To start, increasing mobile access to electronic networks has had a marked impact on public etiquette as physical delineations are becoming less significant in describing the boundaries between public and private. By providing open access to intimate messages virtually superimposed on the DUMBO landscape, Greyworld's Telescapes (1,2) references the increasing experience of overhearing mobile communications. This work playfully recognizes the performative roles we assume. From dramatic or covert message making to surreptitious eavesdropping, these social exchanges significantly effect the development of contemporary identities as digital networks are integrated into street life.
By transmitting the ambient drones of Brooklyn Bridge traffic (circa 1983) and other environmental sounds, Bill Fontana's Falling Echoes evokes familiar hive-like patterns to suggest that our movements through urban space are informed by a prevailing organic logic. His spatialized sound environment offers a nuanced relationship to the Tobacco Warehouse - a historic structure whose current roofless state with open arches exemplifies a construction caught between presence and absence.
At the other end of the block, the Stable offers an inverted architectural relationship. Its windowless walls suggest containment and privacy. The media-rich explorations hosted there take advantage of the controlled environment and recognize the necessary interplay between material and digital worlds. Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture) works these territories in Flux 4.0: Ascape, by combining the speed and seductive language of complex computer-generated shapes with a vintage Cobra race car form to create a sleek, yet baroque, interpretation of endlessly oscillating physical and electronic spaces. Likewise,212box's ***box expands the notion of a billboard into a livable, mediated space. The project embraces the increasing symbiosis between advertising and habitation in the City as consumer culture claims an intensifying relationship between spending and space.
In addition to perceptual engagement, the exhibit addresses social needs within locally specific systems. Marjetica Potrc's investigation of participatory architecture in both developing and developed nations highlights alternative design solutions and innovative uses of technologies ranging from solar-power and water re-use systems to wind-up mobile telephones that do not require electricity. The strategies highlighted in Urban Independent rely on regional knowledge and increased individual initiative that often bypass bureaucratic formalities in their planning and implementation.
Consuming Places offers distinct, even contrasting, viewpoints that are experienced through intimate personal exchanges and dramatic digital spectacles. These artists' works are provocative, pleasurable, and stir the imagination, while never losing an opportunity to critically examine the quality of our lives in the richly complex systems we create.
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