ICC





Preface
Admission
Works 1
Works 2
On Haishi - Mirage City Project




The History of the Project
Discourse on Utopia presented at Any Conference
Conceptual Panel
On the Exhibition: (ICC Gallery)




1. Prototype
2. Signatures
3. Visitors
4. Internet
Participation in the Exhibition through the Web Pages
Participation Artist's
Catalog

April 19th to July 13th, 1997 [Finished] Gallery A





Internet




In the Internet section we welcome "Anyone" to this Utopian project. While Signatures invites international architects and Visitors includes
architects of the digital generation, this section asks for the participation of people from all domains.
It is said that the internet is a spontaneously unified whole of scattered local networks. In contrast to the commercial networks which have "master plans", the internet is basically free and supported by innumerable volunteers, and it is changing the world. Can city planning simulate such a natural becoming ?
There is a basic difference between networks through which electrons flow, and networks through which people, cars and energy circulate. In the world of electrons that travel 300,000 km per second, the notion of distance is disregarded. This is a topological world where only the relationship between objects is meaningful. City planning has been dominated by the geometry of three-dimensional Euclidian space, where the notion of distance is fundamental. The real city, however, is melting dramatically from this classical space into topological space. In what ways will cities be changed by these new elements; topological space, volunteerism, emergence and evolution ? How will they be visualized ? In Haishi -- the Mirage City Project, we begin with the abstract image shown above. We traced the distribution of churches in Venice and projected them onto Haishi. Attributes of being a "church" were stripped away and the scheme was reduced to a distribution of nodes. A synapse-like network will grow between these nodes. By assuming the growth of this network as street patterns, this scheme simulates the process through which urban sectors can be formed. We ask participants to give properties to these nodes and to think of the process through which the network is developed. Participants can develop specific local networks and by layering them together, a unified Haishi network will emerge.
We would also like a comprehensive discussion concerning evolutionary procedures and methods of visualization. We hope people from different fields will participate. Not only architects are invited, but also internet specialists, scholars, Otakus (net addicts), hackers, and so on.