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Whilst conjuring up various aspects of city life, we asked ourselves what kind of ideas can we express?
Unsurprisingly, many ideas sprung to mind.
Out of our brainstorming came the decision to express people living in the city from a population data approach,
We were able to discover that our everyday lives hold many vestiges of data, much more than we expected.
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Based on the raw data, we visualized the flow of big data related to the population of Seoul city.
You can feel, even with the merest glance, the weight of the movement.
As you can see, the visualization of the matrix image provided us with the total weight of the population.
The rhythm of the matrix seemed so simple, but it also reminded us of the movement of the people.
Something that comes in waves like the ebb and flow of the ocean.
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Noise. Movement. People crossing each other.
Seoul is alive, a city bustling with eager people in their twenties. But where are the old people? Hardly any people in their sixties are ever sighted.
Even more, the long-term foreign residents rarely show any movement, as if they are anchored to a specific location.
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As you can see on the screen, the numbers, the movements and the dots are all of us. They represent ourselves.
A myriad of data embodies the movements within the city.
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The three-dimensional images of the dots seem to take on the form of particles drifting across outer space.
Let’s assume that these dots indicate the movements of the people living in Seoul.
This world of numbers before us has the immense power to draw us into the world of data in a moment, and so transfixed by it, we are left looking into it for quite some time.
Is this because data is the product of a very real phenomenon?
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Now, I would like to invite you to look further into the movement, the rhythm of Seoul.
This time, let’s look at the movement.
You might expect to see something obvious, but we found something rather intriguing.
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We attempted a number of ways to audio-visually illustrate the data regarding the temporal and spatial changes of the total population.
Billions of dots spread around Seoul, a city incessantly in motion.
We, the people, like the teeth of wheels in full engagement with each other, move Seoul in so many ways.
Those countless dots come together to form a cloud, a point cloud.
So, we expressed the walking people as numbers, they are dots.
Soon, we were able to visualize the moving dots and rhythmic noise into this form.
There was a moment when the noise met tranquillity, a moment when rhythm was discovered.
The actual sound collected from different places around the city was digitally converted to visualize the rhythm of the city.
Standing under 24 independent channels, one is able to attain a splendid bird’s eye view of Seoul.
The image of the city depicted as a point cloud, rendered by scanning the city with a 3D scanner, seems to be packed with particles of dust, an ethereal hallucination in a virtual world.
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However, the data composed of over one hundred million vertexes was not so trivial once it was converted into something else.
Only after converting the rcs file appropriate for the unity environment, could we then come face to face with Hyehwa-dong.
Departing from the boundless universe of data, we set our foot on one narrow street of Seoul. It felt even smaller than a dot.
While materializing this street into VR, we hoped to express that even in this minute part of a microscopic city, movement continued unabated.
The entity you come across may be a joyful rhythm beating inside your heart, a lonely rhythm standing unaccompanied or a hectic and restless rhythm that always has to be somewhere, anywhere but here.
VR Lost embodies such rhythms.
We may seem to be lonely beings that stand in the middle of the city, lost, without any inclination of where to go or how to get to another place.
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Through the Seoul city rhythm, we took a look at the city’s big data and peeked into the city.
I hope you enjoyed the journey.
We are the people who reside in the same space, yet we never come across each other. Aren’t we all just a little dot?
I hope this time has provided you with the opportunity to think about living together with others, co-existing with others. Also, even if it’s just for a moment, I want you to consider whether your clock for moving around the city is set at the right time.
https://archive.aec.at/prix/showmode/61825/
ⓒ 2018