Reclaim the City:
Tactics of spatial redefinition for an empowered population

Subverting the LiDAR Landscape

Matthew Shaw

This project explores the effects of new technologies of urban sight and urban occupation on the social and political structure of a city.

Proposed are a series of strategic physical interventions which subvert the urban landscape through its digital counterparts.

The design and character of these interventions has been developed through commandeering these new technologies as part of a making lead design process.

Google Earth, Virtual London, and their soon to be released 3D counterparts are peoples preferred method of urban spatial research and are taken as virtual fact by a global internet population. These facts are collected through landscape scale 3D scanning, LiDAR. We are interested in subverting these facts at their point of collection; this is our tool for spatial redefinition and our medium for publishing truths/mistruths/facts and fictions. These subversions do not exist in a purely virtual world, although this is where they are most effectual. Instead the tools of subversion are often physical objects/additions/alterations to the urban fabric. These interfere with the collection of virtual data but also act as facts on the ground and as waypoints linking a physical and virtual world.

The technique of physical and virtual alignment (and more importantly misalignment) is used throughout the making process. I have developed my own 3d scanner which has allowed intuitive, made sketches into the digital realm where they receive a layer of digital editing to provide fixing points, jigs, and machined and 3d printed details, extractions and grafts. This process focuses on the accurate side of 3D scanning. A material and formal language of stealth and confusion is simultaneously developed through scanning to achieve invisibility, inaccuracy and abstraction. Through this process we design with an emphasis on the architectural flash, on stealth mechanics and on making the unscanable.


Matthew Shaw Yr 5 U23 matthew.shaw@ucl.ac.uk 07979958851


Posted on

June 26, 2009

Category