Lost in the modern metropolis

We try to hide in our modern metropolis, in the cityscape, but it seems that sometimes the city itself can be also found hidden in our mind and in our thoughts. Beijing-based photographer Jasper James captures in his photographic series called City Silhouettes the expressive silhouettes of different people mingled in the city’s landscape.

See more silhouettes after the jump

The windmills of our city

Round,
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel

Just twisted. In Nicholas Kennedy Sitton’s photographs, the buildings of a city have been twisted, making the scene appear like a spiral and creating, thus, a hypnotic feeling, making you feel a bit nauseous. Don’ t you think?

See more photos after the jump

Taping up the city

Geometrical forms, cubes, triangles, bricks, all made by tape. Yes, tape, the one you use to seal boxes and to roll up things. But this time in a variety of colors and shapes. New York-based artist Aakash Nihalani uses tape to create new shapes and spaces inside the existing urban landscape, by ‘connecting the dots quite differently from what we are used to in order to fill in our picture of the city’.

See more after the jump

Filling up the gaps

Bodies in the service of filling up the urban void? Choreographer Willi Dorner squeezes human bodies in brightly coloured hoods into the city’s most peculiar places. Into nooks and crannies, actually.

Bodies in Urban Spaces’ project was first conceived in an abandoned residential building in Vienna, in 2004, but it rapidly spread around the streets of the world, from London, France, Norway to downtown Manhattan. Willi Dorner works with performers, dancers and passengers, placing them into spaces where bodies normally do not go and occupying the urban landscape in a completely new way.

More photos after the jump

Northern lights, WiFi lights

Our city is a landscape of (invisible) networks. Three designers from Norway wanted to reveal this immaterial terrain. In their project titled Immaterials, Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen used light and long-exposure photography to capture the conduits of WiFi signals.

They built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights.  The more lights activated on the rod, the stronger the signal is.

“The size of the measuring rod and the light paintings it creates emphasizes the architectural scale at which WiFi operates, and situates the networks in the physical environments that they are a part of,” as Einar Martinussen wrote on YOUrban blog.

See more photos of the project after the jump

Invisible cities

“Love is dead in metropolis/All contact through glove or partition/What a waste/The City/A wasting disease”

What if the city is no longer a wasting disease, but a place of network activity and sharing?  A new kind of city – a city of mind?

Invisible cities is an online interactive project, which “displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data”, according to their creators Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia.

Let’s re-experience our physical environment.

via Brainpickings