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THE GAZE

Harvard Graduate School of Design | REAL Lab (Responsive Living and Adaptive Living)

In collaboration with Heamin Him, Saurabh Mhatre and Mathew James

 

THE CONCEPT

‘The Gaze’ is an investigation exploring the use of projections and displays to create a totalizing perceptual experience. 

The world now reproduces an entire history’s worth of information in a matter of days, soon it will be seconds. The material has become secondary to the continuous flow of pixels, bits, and bytes. This data is the techno excess of a narcissistic generation consumed in its own digital image. convinced the world is fascinated with our every movement, feeling or even bowel movement, we update, curate and control our digital reality. Digital avatars today are more real than physical identities.

 

THE PREMISE
Digital extremities act as portals through which we choose to see the world, and the world demands to see us. Our physical and digital realities are mined, cataloged, sold, analyzed…and (re)presented to us. Agency is both gained and lost in this digitally responsive system. The digital is physically mediated. Input, storage, and output all require physical constructs that cannot be separated from the information itself and often serve as the impetus for its creation.
The physical is digitally mediated. The city we see is a construct of the digital screen. Terminal screens literally translate the world around us, and in the lacan-ian sense, permanently alter our perception of the world even when the terminal is absent.
Digital and analog worlds are assumed to be autonomous. An arbitrary threshold is placed in-between. But this purity is a falsehood. Rather, there is a rapid and continuous oscillation between the two that aggregates somewhere in-between.
The city associates itself with 2 realities, what the city is and what the city is perceived as. There is also a difference in the way an individual perceives the city and the collective perception fo a group of individuals.


Devices like the Oculus Rift traps the user in an isolated cocoon hence constraining the interaction between the user and the city. Collective viewing establishes a relationship between the user and the city as well as facilitates social interactions and discussions between different users through the common context of the City.  


Hence this project uses the ‘Screen’ as a tool to mediate a physical experience through a digital window which either acts as a filter or provides added information or both to enrich and educate the user about the city. Hyperreality is simultaneously desired, dreaded, and inescapable. The entirety of civilization is now seduced by The Gaze, but it is not aware. The digital world cannot be untangled from the physical one. but it can be made visible. We will start a revolution that reveals our new binary-biological reality. The city is ripe for a new type mediation, for the ‘The Gaze’.
 

VIDEOS: FINAL INSTALLATION AND PROTOTYPE

CONCEPT SKETCH

SCENARIO 1

One of the scenario envisioned projects pieces of historical images/data onto the screens. These projections act as overlays on the existing infrastructure, giving the observer a peek into the past. The appearing and disappearing of this window into the past gives the observer a unique experience. This technique can not only be used to reconstruct the past, but also to envision the future. This space can also act as a platform for the city to create and share these own visions. Making ‘The Gaze’ an important tool for collective experience.

SCENARIO 2

The second scenario deals with the idea of making the invisible visible. There is a constant share and exchange of information, ideas, images, texts etc around us through various social media’s, but we never see this exchange in the space around us. But what if we could see this digital interaction in the space around us? What If you would see the number and types of exchanges in the city? Taking forward these ideas, a scenario was designed to collect geo tagged twitter feed and project in its direction. This would give the person experiencing the space a constantly changing dynamic experience of the city.

PROJECT SITE:

At the exact intersection of the two axes - flanked by the twin towers to the north, and the Canton tower to the south - is ‘The Gaze’. A circular form, with the center point lying on these two axes, the ‘The Gaze’ both literally and figuratively defines the new center of Guangzhou. In a city, and a country, where the will of the individual is subsumed by an inhuman urbanity, the ‘The Gaze’ folds the city inside-out. The ‘The Gaze’ liberates the citizenry, making the urban fabric a manifestation of individual desire.

How is this accomplished? From a central viewing point on the island, a series of fragmented screens radiate out, forming a variable enclosure. Viewed from this point, the screens completely enclose or overlap with one another, creating a 360-degree projection surface of variable transparency that mediates users’ perception of the surrounding city.

 

ARRANGEMENT OF THE PROJECTION SCREENS

The projection surfaces are not static either. Rather, they are composed of 4” x 4” triangular pixels made of smart glass. With an electric current passing through, this glass is able to change transparency. Working in strict concert with the projected images, the variable transparency allows for images to be displayed on the surface of the structure, or pass through and spill onto the ground. Also because of the varying opacity of the smart glass the form doesn't have a defined boundary, at one instant it's tangible and visible and it disappears the next. The boundary of the form is defined by the spill of projections on the island and is dynamic.This dynamic spill of projections makes the GAZE, a beacon on the island which through curiosity captures the attention of the people on the axis and around and pull them to the island. 

 

FABRICATION OF THE SCREENS

CIRCUIT GRID - PROJECTION PIXELS

LIGHT SPILL ON THE FLOOR

The projection surfaces are not static either. Rather, they are composed of 4” x 4” triangular pixels made of smart glass. With an electric current passing through, this glass is able to change transparency. Working in strict concert with the projected images, the variable transparency allows for images to be displayed on the surface of the structure, or pass through and spill onto the ground.
Also because of the varying opacity of the smart glass the form doesn't have a defined boundary, at one instant it's tangible and visible and it disappears the next. The boundary of the form is defined by the spill of projections on the island and is dynamic.

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