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build the city around yourself


Cityscapes: Everywhere is Here - by Nic Clear

Conceptions of the City are traditionally tied to notions of permanence and solidity: the city is an enduring example of the human desire to leave a mark on the surface of the planet.

Cities tends to occur at important junctions that combine geographic, material, genetic and informational flows. Cities come into being through an agglomeration of layers, however their exact nature has tended to be specific and unique depending on the formation of those constituent parts and geographical location, that is why we have tended to talk about cities as ‘places’ rather than ‘spaces’. However such assumptions of fixity and specificity have to be questioned as we move through the C21st.

In her 2007 film ‘Scape’ Eva Sommeregger created a series of continuous nested landscapes exploring the spatial restlessness of a cyber-nomad, from mountain, to forest and from desert to wasteland.

In the film an embodied camera occupies disembodied realities: a getting rid of watching the moving body by becoming the moving body. It is a piece of work that alludes to a non-object-based architecture of movement, its architecture is formless and time based. Rather than generating sculptural shapes it creates an ambience that is immersive and experiential.

Created by mixing photography and computer animation, the spatial sophistication of the piece is disguised by its apparent simplicity. The intention was to create space from a ubiquitous "nomocentric" viewpoint (360° x 360°), using a technique similar to Google's street view.

Eva has developed some of the underlying intentions of the Scape project and created a more complex interactive proposition with Cityscapes. Moving away from the rigid linear strictures of the film time line to create a fluid space of possibilities where users can define their own nested landscapes creating hybrid synthetic spaces that reflect both the dynamic ambitions of our global spatial intelligence and impermanence of our spatial conceptions.

Through its use of a collage of fragments Cityscapes alludes to the development of a globalised economy, the expansion of communication networks that have made our cities especially more interchangeable and less particular and to what Frederic Jameson has called Postmodern hyperspace: a type of space that constitutes a form of ‘historically novel’ environment in which conventional ideas of cartography become impossible. Indeed Jameson even calls on us to ‘grow new organs’ to understand this new form of space.

However Jameson is a 70 year old Marxist and his formulation of ‘postmodern hyperspace’ is nearly 25 years old and for a generation where the shopping mall is as familiar as the home and inter-continental travel is almost as mundane as walking to the local park, this kind of fluid and unmappable space has its own logic its own set of technologies and representational possibilities.

What Eva has created is a tool for both mapping and creating individual spatial experiences, users are able to collect and hybridise the familiar and the unfamiliar, the exotic and the banal, the past and the future. Within Cityscape space collapses but is reconstructed through individual participation and practice.

There is no there, there is only here and everywhere is here.


Nic Clear is a registered architect, he teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL where he runs Unit 15, a postgraduate design unit that specialises in the use of film, video, animation and motion graphics, and is History and Theory coordinator on the MArch (Architectural Design). A founding director of the now defunct General Lighting and Power, whose work covered everything from pop promos to architecture and from advertsiting campaigns to art installations, Nic now divides his time between writing fiction, making drawings and making films and sometimes doing all three at once.
(biography from avatar london)