Team project at SUSTech School of Design, led by Prof. Enza Migliore and Prof. Marcel Zaes Sagesser.
As a team member, I was the leader for the 8-week on-site fieldwork in Shenzhen, such as photography, video, 3D scan, organization, classification and archiving for samples etc. After the fieldwork, I ran experiments on digital-physical materials experiments to 3D print, negotiated and associated with the curatorial team of the Shenzhen Design Week, and edited a part of the film that documents the fieldwork in Shenzhen, China.
“A Grain of” is a technology-based, speculative approach toward a holistic understanding of our cities – on the example of Shenzhen. Scientific methods of long-term data sampling from three exemplary areas of the city have yielded in a database that informs this research: a mountainous urban forest, an under-construction high tech district on a reclaimed site, and a densely populated historical retail area. The database shows how the material ecologies we live with daily are assemblages shaped by human, geological, industrial, and technological forces. While this holds for quite any location on Earth, this research shows the specifics of what these forces produce on a micro-scale in Shenzhen. The holistic approach allows this research to expand beyond material data to sonic, magnetic, vibrational, and digital traces. Methods of speculative futuring and scientific data re-interpretation are then combined with advanced technologies.
Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Design
Materialities Research Group + Sound Studies Group
Team leaders:
Enza Migliore, Assistant Professor
Marcel Sagesser, Assistant Professor
Research Team Members:
Yiyuan Bai, Zhaorui Liu, Zhonghui Tang, Simeng Wang, Yaohan Zhang, Bo Dong, Peihua Huang, Yujing Ma, Zichun Xia, Zhiyi Zhang
Shenzhen, China 2024
The exhibit suggests an immersive room: a large cube representing a material “grain” of this city, into which the audience steps. Data visualization, sonification, and upscaling of micro-materialities produce a multimodal critical experience for the audience, who can access the hybrid nature of the built urban world around us. Through this research that shows the city as a dynamic composite assemblage and combines the scientific with the sensory, we can speculate on the hybridization of urban matter and how it will shape our future cities on a micro scale – on the scale of the individual “grain.”
