Hiding in Plane Site, [Las Vegas] US

description:

The computer vision systems that survey, catalogue and archive the world around us are services that render two versions of the world at once. There is now the physical space that we occupy and the digital rendition of that space that we, increasingly more frequently, also occupy. The urban landscape is mediated by handheld cartographic instruments that help us navigate through transportation systems, call upon networks of drivers, occupy strangers homes, or find potential lovers. The digital interface for social exchange and monetary transactions has radically shifted how we act and consume. In the negotiation between the built environment and the variety of computer vision systems that move through it, there is a margin of error that architecture has the potential to occupy. The speed of technological innovation has outpaced our privacy protections. Our digital profile can be tracked by the government and corporations in ways which were once unthinkable. The recent shifts in how we represent and exhibit ourselves and our private information have come on so rapidly and forcibly that the general public as well as corporations are still grappling to understand its impact. With ubiquitous computing comes pervasive surveillance. The desire to maintain privacy is still common, and yet the general public is becoming increasingly comfortable with surveillance. People both actively and passively abdicate their privacy and participate in surveillance, safety, and for the sake of convenience.

Hiding in Plane Site offers a chance for its inhabitants to regain a sense of privacy through its blockage and baffling of digital surveillance systems. This is an alternative suburban domesticity that occupies and camouflages itself within the new spaces which emerge where our digital and physical worlds overlap, graft and fold on one another.

team:
Team: Bryce Taylor, Adin Rimland
Instructors : Lawrence Blough, Cathryn Dwyre, Jeff Johnson

data:
awards: Degree Project Award for Best Thesis
date: 2018
location: Las Vegas, Nevada
tags: architecture, academic

The site is situated in the sparse suburban fabric within the southwest region of Las Vegas. Working from the visual and material culture established in the last 100 years of Las Vegas’s existence, this project seeks to leverage emerging computer vision systems as a way to open up a new discourse about how buildings can engage with technology.

Matrix of different optical baffling strategies that can be applied to a building. The project uses images as material, and material as image as a way to address notions of entropy and lifecycles of buildings within the Las Vegas valley. In addition to the assesment and application of the camouflage techniques, one of the primary workflows that informed the design of the project was to use the computer vision systems themselves to create a feedback loop between production and representation.

taylor&studio

Hiding in Plane Site, [Las Vegas] US