APD - Week 4 - Play and Place

Theme

In responds to this week's theme play and place, I have made an animation of a graffiti street in Melbourne. I basically used AE to add effects and filter to create a new cyberpunk Melbourne Street. The playful doesn’t mean only change the tone and the atmosphere of the picture or video, I want to show the difference between the same place but in a different time and space, it is a sort of transformation of space and universe as well.

Context

Sheller and Urry (2004) mentioned that the playfulness of place is about the urge to travel elsewhere, the pleasure of indulging in another environment, and the fascination with the small differences in the world's materiality. I would like to start with the difference between the real world and the imaginary world. I also got the inspiration from the documentary in the class last week, it said to be playful of the city is to image the future of the city… Therefore, I was starting to think about what this place going to be like in 10 years, or even hundreds of years.

The related work is called <Cyberpunk Shanghaiing>, which is a short film of approximately two minutes of motion response directed by Lei Alucard and produced in collaboration with the famous electronical music producer Anti-General. Unlike other short films that focus on storytelling, takes the form of title sequence to reflect concepts and more. This digital artefact combines the use of modeling, lighting and background music without any lyrics that shows a future world that human-made machines have been able to monitor and even manipulate the world, they have become the gods of the new world.

Methods

I used AE to create this whole project. I went to the street of flinders to record the video, next imported the video into AE and did the camera tracking. With camera tracking, it can track a point with obvious features in the video screen and add text, images and other information to the tracked point; it can also track a surface with obvious boundaries and add text, video and other information to the surface, so that the video and design elements can be combined. Next, I analyze the street, for example, the places with gates can be imagined as some commercial or social places, and the people on the street can be imagined as virtual cyborg. these added materials are not randomly stuck to the walls or the ground, it appears based on the characteristics of things and places in the real world.

Response

The Final animation is here:

https://youtu.be/NAVgt44C3aE

Reflection

I realized that I have a very strong interest in futuristic and cyberpunk. Also, I think place is more than just a coordinate or a location. Just like my project, it doesn't just represent a street, it represents a space and another universe. The idea of creativity about space and place reminds me of the previously popular topic of metaverse. The metaverse can be a digital space concept as well as a physical space concept. The Internet of Things will mirror data, geospatially triggered content into the metaverse, allowing us to understand, manipulate and simulate the real world in new ways. The virtual real estate of the metaverse underwrites digital assets, and various digital arts can shine in this space. If there are opportunities, I will explore the concept of cyberpunk or metaverse even further in subsequent studies.