Draft 1: Zoom, Pan, Rotate

"URBAN ECOLOGY" - the rapidly narrowing title for my graduation project.

Music by Mason Jennings.
2 minutes of video, composed from renders using 3D Max.


Draft 1 further details my investigations into ownership and environment. This research is broached by tracing urban bodies of such a scale that people are like cells in a living creature. Such an image is foreboding and wondrous at the same time. Symbiotic with this great creature are a variety of smaller creatures. These smaller creatures evolve by necessity in such a way as to recombine elements dispersed by the larger creature. Thus my research takes the guise of a life cycle and interdependency diagram that has a life of its own.

The diagram is navigated by assigning zoom, pan and rotate to various modes.

Zoom associates with Point of View, such as the identifiable everyday experience of travelling through a transport tunnel. Point of View later allows the viewer to become other things, such as the smog itself; the viewer zooms away from the ventilation stack and gains an aerial view seen more often by birds than people.

Pan associates with systemic mapping. The viewer gains a sense of larger symphonies, such as the tunnel. It carries smog to ventilation stacks, but is also like a leaky pipe; Seeds flow within and around it, being nourished and finding cracks to grow in. Systemic mapping starts with a known item (the tunnel) and ends by mapping a new, unrecognised system (the smog island, complete with craters).

Rotate associates with growth; a community garden ekes out of the cracks between concrete boxes. Growth is the devalued creating value of itself, a garden carving a rotated crater from solid smog – and establishing a prime economic market of carbon offsets.

Rising problems caused symbolically and realistically by the ventilation stack are visualised as decreasing distinctiveness in our urban environment. Thus as smog rises from our tunnels, it rises from the ground as a solid barrier – an urban island of oppressive solidity. This veil is not just smog, it is the sealed earth and manicured public gardens which tolerate little creatures only as outlaws. From and with this solid mass, various potentials are created. Existing elements, otherwise in a state of dispersal (such as locals losing out in a wave of gentrification) are able to recombine in successful ways. (Community) seeds can be planted, (economic) landscapes sculpted and (ecological) worlds can be uncovered.