Tom Fudge:
If you go to the headquarters of Calit2 at UC San Diego, you can enter a different world. It's a place where you can build roads and change the landscape to hold them. You manipulate an actual whirlwind of cars across the landscape as you build your city. Houses fly into the air and then land on roadside plots, creating new housing tracts. But the houses look a bit incomplete, open and empty. And where are the people? There are none in this community you seem to be building for them.
What I've described is a piece of interactive art called Scalable City. It's part video game, part urban design tool and part social critique. Calit2 is short for the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. And art that's been created for the Institute is the work of Sheldon Brown, who joins me in studio.
Sheldon Brown and Geoff Ryman will join author Kim Stanley Robinson for an artist talk and readings centered around Scalable City. The event takes place tonight at 5:30pm in UC San Diego's Atkinson Hall. Scalable City will be on view through December 15th in the gallery@Calit2 in Atkinson Hall on the UCSD campus.
Guests:
Sheldon Brown is the artist in residence at UCSD's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, also known as Calit2. He's also the director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts.
Geoff Ryman is the writer in residence at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. He also has a new novel called The King's Last Song.
