LOST DIMENSION D-STRICT

On the screens that surround us and through which we experience our physical surroundings, buildings and cityscapes are virtualities that inhabit a digital framework of time and space. From satellite imagery to Google Maps, surfaces and 3d geometries are replaced by clouds of points, abstracted from their physical positions. They create a new spatiality, a world without gravity. The buildings represented by these points literally vanish when we get close to them, immersing us in a digital world that has lost its dimensionality.

Lost Dimension, D’strict is a large-scale, site-specific adaptation specially developed for the ARTE MUSEUM in Chengdu by D’strict. For this 360-degree version, all surfaces of a 35-by-13-meter exhibition space are fully projected upon, creating an extraordinary interactive cinematic experience of unprecedented scale. This highly immersive environment, with projection surfaces seamlessly extending across all walls and the floor, brings the original concept of the work, the physical experience of an unfolding 3D world that expands infinitely in all directions, to a whole new level. As the audience is not only looking at an image but is physically completely surrounded by it. 

The digital city representation is created by scripts that are automatically harvesting this data from Google Street View’s API. This generated interactive 3D data cloud is both abstract and realistic at the same time a vast, procedurally generated landscape where online data from real-world streets reverberates.

Credits:
Concept and production: Marnix de Nijs. Sound design: Boris Debackere. Unity development: Pawel Homenko. Onsite software support: Benjamin Bacon. Spasm for Live, spatial audio mixer: V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Sebastian Frisch. Hardware programming and electronics: Joak. Video documentation: Shengbin Zhang
Curator: Li Zhenhua. Production Dstrict: Xiaolin Su