Satellite Cities / artist:
/ Nicole Franchy
Satellite Cities, 2009
Interactive video installation
Nicole Franchy’s research began with the study of the accelerated growth of Chinese cities in the Pearl River delta. This huge urban area, a meshwork of architecture and landscape covering 1500 kilometres of highway, connects three cities, and has 5 airports. This great parasite organism—apparently perfect—encompasses dysfunctions due to its vertiginous growth: ghost towns that are disconnected from the networks of abandoned highways and industrial complexes. Following this discussion, Franchy provides an analogy between electronic circuit patterns and these new models of urban growth. This is an interactive installation based on a dystopian view of contemporary global society as well as on the technical specifications of a circuit: a technological nomenclature. Franchy abstracts architectural constants and standardizes them in three patterns that structure the models of three cities. The installation configures a translucent network similar to that of a living organism in which one can see the functioning of its internal organs. This seemingly perfect system encloses functionality in a paradoxical form: the video projections of highways in the midst of the transparent diorama do not connect the different zones with each other but, on the contrary, isolate them.
Curator's project: CONTRAINTE / RESTRAINT
