OP City

Year: 2012–2013

OP City brought together collaborative teams of architects and media artists, each of which developed and presented case-study experiments exploring the use of new, popularly accessible analytical and visualization techniques that enable one to see the city anew.

Despite a steady shift in the world’s population into metropolitan regions, efforts to better conceptualize, represent and communicate new interpretations of, and propositions about urban life remain unexamined. Coincident with the rapidly increasing sophistication and number of technologies and media by which to do so, techniques of description today either rely, disappointingly, upon the overuse of data, or the farmed-out rendering. OP City explored how the urban future may be extrapolated or "produced" by observing the city in new ways that these technologies afford – from mapping and diagrams to graphic narrative, from gaming / motion graphics to digitally-manipulated photography.