Scalable City opens at The Exploratorium

Our world is edging more and more towards digital environments. What are the societal and cultural implications? Does it change the way we think? The way we feel? Virtual Unreality, a new interactive exhibition in the Exploratorium's Seeing Gallery, brings together three digital artworks by internationally-known artists that use game technology to explore the unreality of virtual landscapes. The works are Life Spacies II by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Scalable Cities by Sheldon Brown, and Oceans (2000-2007) by Dan Torop. Virtual Unreality is open to the public from September 14, 2007-January 7, 2008.

Scalable Cities explores and creates an urban/suburban/rural environment at a rapid pace. As you move along, you literally "paint" the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. Each step in this data visualization pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying, exaggerating, and adding on the landscape algorithmically and exponentially. This interactive virtual artwork provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that you -- the participant -- are (too) rapidly creating. While the project neither indicates nor embraces the future you build, it offers an extrapolation of its own tendencies, heightening awareness of the aesthetics and underlying logic of the game and how it determines much of our cultured existence.

Scalable City on Exhibit at National Academy of Sciences

After Los Angeles, Warsaw, Linz, and Shanghai, Washington D.C. is the newest venue for an interactive multimedia art installation developed by University of California, San Diego Visual Arts professor and CRCA director Sheldon Brown. Components of his Scalable City project went on display today at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in the nation's capital, as part of a new exhibition titled "Speculative Data and the Creative Imaginary: Shared Visions Between Art and Technology."

The National Academies exhibition will be on view through Aug. 24, and is organized in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery's Creativity and Cognition Conference, to be held in Washington June 13-15.

The exhibition features interactive computer installations, large-format digital prints, and wearable technology, representing a confluence of research and creative practices that include the visual arts, design, architecture, performance, science, technology, and engineering. These works illustrate methods of creative inquiry and practice that have the potential to lead to new forms of knowledge.

MOCA Shanghai - Video Documentation

2 minutes documentation video of the Scalable City installation at the Shanghai Moca:

Large Resolution:
Scalable City - Quicktime (37.5 Mb)
Scalable City - Windows Media (37.6 Mb)

Medium Resolution:
Scalable City - Quicktime (11.5 Mb)
Scalable City - Windows Media (10.5 Mb)

MOCA Shanghai - more images

Scalable City at MOCA Shanghai

REMOTE/CONTROL, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai's 10^th exhibition, is an investigation of the presence of technology in contemporary art today, and the fraught encounter between these art objects and today's 'multi-medial' spectator. Featuring the work of both international and local artists, it is an examination of various perceptual systems, processes, narrative structures, and aesthetic strategies that focus on the question of agency.

Photos of the installation:

High-Resolution Scalable City scenes shown on massive display

Scalable City 4K cinema scenes shown on 8 Megapixel display at the Waag Society in Amsterdam. Overlays show a comparison with TV and HDTV resolutions.

Ars Electronica Center Installation

Scalable City opens at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. On exhibit for a year, a three-screen stereo version. The installation is located in the VR Arena. "Take a virtual walking tour of Scalable City. The point of departure is provided by actual satellite data that undergo a fascinating process of transformation to become a fictive urban landscape!"

Check out a Quicktime VR clip of the installation.

Photos from the installation: