ARMATURES, NODES, AND TRAJECTORIES
Project: New fluidities

Construction of the ARMATURES begins immediately as platforms anchored into the opposing coasts of Taiwan China, and Japan. With this versatile scaffolding in place, thus begins an incremental program of urban détournement in which existing infrastructure is reconfigured into new assemblages and installed atop the floating platforms of the ARMATURES. Once reaching a critical mass of 30,000 to 50,000 inhabitants, these buoyant nodes rise with the incoming sea levels and begin a slow procession into the interstitial waters of the Taiwan strait. Biomimetically drawing from the locomotion of starfish the ARMATURES remain anchored to the relatively shallow ocean floor of the continental shelf and begin to take on the unknowable TRAJECTORIES and fluid dynamics of a swarm. As the ARMATURES expand en route to deeper waters they become programmed as subsurface hubs for emergent forms of commerce and transportation, provide filtration for contaminated sea water and temporary habitat for marine life, and a frame for hydrological and geothermal power generation.
This process continues through the 21st century and into the 22nd. As the buoyant NODES multiply and retreat into the sea, the once doomed coastal cities grow increasingly less dense. By 2100 the total disappearance former mega cities, and the continued pixelization of their geographic distinction coincides with the convergence of the earliest deployed nodes in the central waters of the Taiwan Strait, resulting in the material and cultural unification of the region. As support infrastructure of the ARMATURES consolidates to form surface networks, the buoyant metropolis continues to evolve, concerned not with fixed states or totalizing formal organizations, but the chaotic behavior of large scale assemblages over time.

Wed, Mar 26, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: New fluidities