Keiichi Matsuda: Augmented Reality - Winner of Visionary Cities Competition 2010

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Homefront Dissolve

Source: BLDGBLOG

Keiichi Matsuda, a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, produced this fantastic short video in the final year of his M.Arch. It was, he writes, "part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality."  The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.  The bewildering groundlessness of surfaces within surfaces is beautifully captured by this video, and its portrayal of drop-down menus and the future hand gestures needed to access them is also pretty great. Augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow.  Now how do we use all that home-jamming ad space for something other than Coke and Tesco? What other subscription-content feeds can be plugged into this vertiginous interface?

Take a look—and you can find more thoughts, and another video, on Matsuda's own blog. http://keiichimatsuda.tumblr.com/

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Guy Ben-ner 'Stealing Beauty'

In response to Rob Bothma's post a few days ago the link above takes you to a review of video artist Guy Ben-ner whose work takes place, in this example, in an Ikea store.  He regularly involves his family in his work, in this case using the various 'homey' displays of the superstore (with price tags) to stage his narrative: that of an ordinary family in familiar surroundings.  However, the store is open to the public, as normal, and shoppers are seen traipsing through the set with their giant yellow shopping bags, wondering what the heck is going on: as do the management of Ikea as the artist never seeks permission to film there.

Ikea as a Hyperreal space

When I begin to think of simulation spaces and elements of hyperreal I think of shops and especially shops with showrooms. Ikea is a brilliant example of this. When you walk around Ikea you become part of an elaborate portrayal of the ideal home that has been designed with great detail and attention (for example in some room sets there are pictures that show "family").

Even though we know and are aware that this is a shop we become oblivious to this marketing ploy. The room "sets" show a way of life and customers think that Ikea are not just selling things but a lifestyle. This abstract space however does feel strangely real although it is a staged representation we begin to use the space as if it was real. And Ikea generally use this to their adavantage, thus none of those "DO NOT SIT ON THE FURNITURE" signs. All this means that we the consumer do not think of this as a falsified environment, we think that it is real so this space becomes the hyperreal.

Flooded MacDonalds

A recent trip to London to see the following film at an exhibition, which comprised a very convincing replica of a MacDonald's Burger Restaurant which gradually becomes flooded, replete with all the design paraphernalia and detritus that comes with themed restaurant spaces:



Flooded McDonald's from Superflex on Vimeo.