Flatland: The Architecture of Packets, Pixels & Neuron
> Project Type: Academic
> Location: 1st Arrondissement, Paris
> Instructor: Fazin Lotfi-Jam
> Year: 2022
> Role: Collaborative Project with Adam Wang
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Edwin A. Abbott, 1884), juxtaposed, overlapped and entangled multi-dimensional worlds in a communal land and reconcilable positions. Applying these mathematical postulates to proof, we bring the polar-opposite pairs, metaverse and physical worlds, to the conversation in the current technological and social context, in which architecture acts as a mechanism to mediate the binary relationship.
What is Metaverse? Interpretation of this terminology always comes with tropes and bluffing. The user is isolated from reality by wearing the goggles and controllers to enter virtuality. The biopower and body politics are diminished to the greatest extent to enter the metaverse. This huge barrier blocks the creatures in the metaverse from navigating their value in the physical space, where all the value systems and civilisation for humans are established. The metaverse is stuck as the mirage floating in the air, failing to transform its value.
Metaverse is a puppet game as it dispels the restriction of the physical body as the carrier of consciousness. The binary humanity of biopower and anatomy politics defined by Michel Foucault inevitably leans on one side. When human memories are extracted from their bodies and saved on big corporations' servers, everyone becomes John Malkovich. Equity and freedom escape further from us.
In this project, the new tactic is to transform architecture as the goggle to overlap virtuality over physical existence. By deconstructing Louis Vuitton’s Spring-summer Fashion Show, we re-proposed a mixed reality to augment sensitiveness and engagement in the fashion industry. The site-La Samaritaine is unrolled in time scale from the imperial of Louis XIV to the meta era, whereas the urban context of Paris in that time is involved through the hologram and AR installation to create an immersive stage for performance. The storytelling order will overtake the spatial adjacency to dominate circulation. The sense of physical environments: periphery, scale and interior/exterior will be undermined. However, though the building as a dynamic mechanism creates illusional intimacy in a designed way, it solidifies hierarchy in another. The cruel fact of fashion is about tagging people by their garments and assets. Technologies are inevitably adopted to veil the existing trace of low-brow by jamming the backstage. The essence of fashion as deliriousness for high-brow is unchanged, though, after glossing.
The final product of the project is a film that leads the audience from the city through the indigested back of the house to the glamorous runway space. It confronts Fashion Classism and criticism towards materialism and hierarchy.