Scalable City

Scalable City creates  an urban/suburban/rural environment via a data visualization pipeline.   Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying   exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The  results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and  interactive multi-user games and virtual environments.





Throughout these artworks, a variety of computer concept  buzzwords take on physical form. Wallowing in them provides equal  measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms  that we are rapidly creating. The project neither indicts nor embraces  this future, but offers an extrapolation of its algorithmic tendencies,  heightening one's awareness of the aesthetics of the underlying logic as  it becomes the determinant of much of our cultured existence.

Scalable City is a project by Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab.



Installation - Calit2, UC San Diego, 2008



I really invite you to visit the website that offers lots of links (text, video, images). And, in the section "in progress", we also see several pictures of Open Sim ....




 



Award :
A project proposal submitted by Sheldon Brown (Director, Experimental Game Lab, UCSD) and Lev Manovich (Director, Software Studies Initiative, UCSD) was awarded $300,000 two year EAGER grant by National Science Foundation (NSF).  The  title of the proposal: A Cultural Analytics Framework for Identifying  and Integrating Creative Patterns of User Behavior and Experience in the  Scalable City Multi-User Virtual World. EAGER grants aim to support "high-risk, exploratory, and potentially transformative research."

Source :

• http://scalablecity.net 
• http://lab.softwarestudies.com
• http://www.gehan-kamachi.net

Gehan