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#Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino, an Italian writer, dealt with imaginative cities that do not actually exist in his novel, “Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, 1972).” In this omnibus edition, the story is about Marco Polo, the explorer, who converses about 55 fictitious cities that he has witnessed (or so he says) with the emperor Kubla Khan of Mongolia. From the fabricated episodes told by real figures, we view different sides of a city.

Imaginary cities unfold, such as a spiderweb-like city hanging in the air between two mountains, a city walled with piles of trash, a city constructed with only water pipes, and a city consisting of three different places, one for the living, one for the dead, and one for the still unborn. In particular, the fictitious city of “Valdrada” has one city standing upright in the lake and the other upside down as its reflected version. Everything exists equally and repeats itself equally since each point of the city was created to reflect in the lake. Its description reminds us of a “smart city” built based on the “digital twin” technology of today.

#“Smart City,” a twin of the existing city

“Smart City,” which is one of the main issues in the field of city planning today, is an alternative to the future city that is capable of solving problems found in the city. Singapore has succeeded in creating “Virtual Singapore,” a virtual reality version of the city, by replicating the whole city with “digital twin” technology.

The “Virtual Singapore” project claims that it can provide solutions to a wide variety of problems in the city through the utilization of 3D modeling of all data in Singapore, including buildings, roads, parks, and government institutions, as well as big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, etc. Some of its strengths include the predictability of multiple variables in building design, such as location of wind and lighting, which improves the completeness of urban planning, and the estimation of traffic, energy flow, and national disaster situations to find problems and solutions. The project can implement various functions by using real data in a virtual setting and applying it to the real world through simulation.

#Kim Ayoung: ways to explore future cities

What would future cities imagined through virtual reality in contemporary art look like? The series “Surisol Underwater Lab” by artist Kim Ayoung squarely faces various matters of the city yet deals with them in interesting ways.
This is the world view of the Surisol underwater lab created by the artist.

Reference: Artist Kim Ayoung Website http://ayoungkim.com/wp/

Kim Ayoung, “Surisol: POVCR,” 2021, VR Experience, 17 minutes

Her work is fiction that has created an imaginary world, set in a city in the near future a decade after COVID-19, composed with details if one looks in the story. The experience invites the viewers by creating a strange sense as it makes sense and seems real, as if it can actually happen in the real world.

In the work titled “Surisol: POVCR,” with virtual reality as the medium with a strong emphasis, two individuals, one the AI called “Surisol,” who manages the lab, and the other is “Sohaila,” working as a senior researcher who immigrated from Yemen, appear. Putting on a set of VR headphones, the viewers first listen to the order saying “Awake!” which functions as a way to make the audience “awake” and becomes immersive in the fictional world. As the viewers engage with the world, they are able to experience different perspectives, whether those of Sohaila or others, and come to realize whose perception they are using in looking at the world.

The title, “POVCR,” means “point of view corrosivity reality,” which is coined by the artist. The bodies of viewers exist in the real world, but with their vision and mind immersed in virtual reality, they will wake up once again from the dreamy world after 15 minutes. In her work, the audience experiences being not only in reality but inside the work as well, as if they enter a translucent existence.

“Surisol Underwater Lab Guided Tour” takes it a step further, literally inviting participants into the world created at VRCHAT, the social media VR platform, for a certain amount of time. The artist plays the role of a tour guide who leads the visitors to the inside and outside of the lab, enabling them to feel and experience the world created by the artist.

Kim Ayoung, “Surisol Underwater Lab Guided Tour,” 2022

Her attempt to cross the boundaries of different media allows us to freely experience the real world and the virtual one, leading us to face the problems we have and contemplate what we need to do for the future.

How can we overcome the crisis of the city we live in? Hoping that the artwork can be one way of offering inspiration for answering the question, I would like to introduce the last part of the novel, “Invisible Cities.”