Satellite Cities, an interactive installation by Peruvian artist Franchy Nicole, investigates the relationship between large urban centers, the individuals that live within them, and maps of their location. In this installation, Nicole adopted a model of the delta region of the Pearl River in China to address the inherent problems caused by rapid urban growth—specifically this area of 1,500 km of roads connecting three cities and five airports.
The models of the maps, audio, and video of the installation are connected to software and a video camera that divides the space in half and makes the piece respond to the presence of individuals according to their location, movement, and the present population density. What we see are changes in the “living organism” of the piece, according to the dynamics of the great urban centers. Connections appear and disappear behind the static structures of the maps and generate interconnected blocks, revealing conurbations as well as isolated and abandoned industrial areas turned into ghost towns.The installation was part of the show [Contrainte/Restraint](http://www.molior.ca/en/projets/contrainte-restraint-nouvelles-pratiques-en-arts-mediatiques-du-bresil-et-du-perou
), which brought together works by artists from Brazil and Peru, investigating what is common between different cultural, social, and political contexts of both countries through the use of media technologies.Nicole told us why she chose this specific region as a model:I took the case of the Pearl River delta in China to illuminate the fact that some of the cities went from being fishing towns to mega cites in short periods of time. These cases of constant transformation, where architecture emerges as a structural sign, are taken in Satellite Cities as points of departure, not necessarily with a nod to intimating universal or absolute truth, but just to think about the times we live in, mostly and mainly ruminating on expansion’s effects on coexistence. Also, the piece stresses the dichotomies of cyberculture, and an accelerated pace of life that leads to increasingly homogeneous behaviorial patterns, resulting in the anonymity of individual identities in an information society.Satellite Cities appropriates the influenced conditions of a model world and affects the absurdities that its own user (man) has produced in the context of accelerated advanced capitalism.
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