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| Charley Peters, Future Cities (2011), London |
The work I produced recently for Smart Urban Stage is now online on the Future of the City pages of the website. In the project, Professor Gordon Wagener, Head of Design, Mercedes-Benz, Stuttgart asked eight international artists and designers to respond to the question, 'In reference to urban mobility, how will design evolve in the upcoming two decades?'
The work I made translated my studio practice into a series of ephemeral drawn interventions in London. I am interested in the lines of movement within the city, and how, as cities continue to grow in the future, the paths of motion of the wandering flaneur intersect the transit of automated transport and vice versa. The works responded to the architectural and natural features of the locations, marking out physical lines and spaces in duct tape in a playful encounter with the urban landscape. Sometimes the placement of the tape collapsed foreground and background features once documented photographically as in the image on the left. The works were not planned and had to be executed quickly in response to the locations.
To accompany the works I wrote the following statement, which can be seen on the Future City site alongside the complete series of images,
'...To navigate through the urban environment we need to react to the materiality of its evolving geography, to learn to play with space and draw lines through a city that respond to our physical experiences. These ephemeral drawings in tape use locations in London as a canvas on which to plot linear journeys and spatial encounters. Lines divide, designate and dictate our urban mobility, but they are also a legacy of our passage through cities as autonomous individuals'
More responses to Gordon Wagener's question will be uploaded over the next few weeks.
The complete series can be seen at:
http://www.smart-urban-stage.com/blog/future-of-the-city/how-will-design-evolve-4/
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| Left: Creating the work, London SW11 Right: Future Cities (2011) |
