https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4No4Zw_EFU&t=97s
Our thesis all began with one question. If the cemetery was the type corresponding to death in the urban context, what type corresponding to death on the internet? The current contemporary condition of digital social life gives us a chance to rethink death, memory, and the afterlife.
To answer the question, we established a city builder platform and an object library of Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s famous monuments. We designed a procedural modeling algorithm that transforms the generic input information into multiple formal variations for our city builder platform. The world’s datum is a neutral grid, and the standard language explores ideas of stacking and aggregation as expressions of an amalgamation of memories. Through this, we created three different-scaled scenes in our software. From public to private, we made the space of the city, neighborhood, interior.
We aimed to create a software that would act as a neutral ground onto which any personal identity can be projected. The software acts as a machine for decontextualization, erasing every trace of the original and producing an even playing field that corresponds to all memories, aggregated together. The idea is very close to Aldo Rossi’s. He was exploiting the ‘concept of type’ to create a monument that interrelates ancient to modern examples of memorial monuments, without specific associations or distinct characterizing of any particular style in history. Thus, we chose some of his famous monuments to transplant into our software as essential elements.
The first layer in our software is called the City. In this layer, the user can interact with the generated process, and the city-builder platform will auto generate a city of memory, filled with city-scaled content.
The second layer is a neighborhood-builder platform that allows the user to become more immersed and walk around the city in an avatar.
The third layer, the Interior, shifts the view of a user into the first-person mode, thus completing the transition of views from completely detached to personal. In this layer, the user can experience the highest resolution level. The memories take on a much smaller scale and become a world of floating objects with different qualities. The interior scene can support an immersive experience of browsing actual people’s memories, visualized as an extensive collection of personal objects and images. This information was taken from social platforms and transformed into an assemblage through various techniques, including photogrammetry and modeling.
Rossi’s neutral objects are similar to our virtual objects. They are all generic in some sense, as they are always de-contextualized and separated from any previous meaning carrying as precedents, once they end up in the software. The software is a "machine for de-contextualization" that can reorganize all inputs in a generic way and present them as parts of a "neutral" new image of an abstract city.
The immersive experience inside The Memory City distinguishes itself from the antiquated forms of memory. The Memory City recovers the kind of ritual participation in remembering and memory, which used to exist but has gradually diminished. The act of visiting the grave for cleaning or offering food and incinerating paper objects is no longer easy to accomplish. The Memory City is not a physical material world. It is a space of remembrance presented in the form of a procedural builder platform. We explore this as a method to make a dematerialized typology set in an immersive, endless virtual space.