what are
virtual
gatherings?
Gatherings are an exchange of space, time, presence, knowledge. Taking away the physical aspect of gatherings, it becomes an abstract of that communication that gets split into levels of privacy and transparency. Your participation and presence is recorded in the internet.
Our projects
Using the Distant Crowds report as a research base, each of us developed our own focus, as common themes emerged.
Gathering in the realm of education was explored by Bebe, through her proposal for a remote school inspired by the Thai temple school structure, and by Joy, who focused on the realm of academic research, networking and accreditation. Issues of health were addressed by Bibissara in her proposal for a remote bathhouse, drawing on the ideas behind soviet sanatoriums, and by Margherita in a spatial structure for support groups to help those with substance abuse issues. Ideas of identity were the focus of Louisa’s cosplay stage and library for the shaping, archiving and embodying of popular narratives, and of Erika’s transformation of corporate soon-to-be-ruins with a data-scape formed of merging virtual shadows. Spaces for minorities were created by Siyue, who shaped an augmented future for China’s Dong diaspora, and by Eva, who wove a series of safe spaces for oppressed communities. Frank’s project addressed the challenge of contemporary union meetings alongside a portrayal of current working conditions in the construction site, whilst Eeda’s project explored legal issues surrounding the trial of crimes committed in virtual worlds. The urban scale was addressed both by Deborah, whose new national participation system for Singapore took the form of a virtual garden, and Bulat, who faced the challenge of building civic community values around the emerging NFT market.
Water as Sorcery: Collective Healing
This project aims to establish a new Public Wellness Platform in which citizens gather as communities to collectively participate in wellness practices that are deployed Virtually and felt Physically. The project is inspired by the rich context of Soviet Sanatoriums, their history and ideology.
The project proposes a new model of a Global Virtual Bathhouse inspired by sanatorium culture built on a required access to the main sensorial translator - water. Citizens are invited to take a rest during the day, recover from medical or mental treatment, or share their unique water experiences with their companions from the comfort of their bathroom.
The Dollhouse of Communal Healing
The project aims to the design of a virtual gathering space for people struggling with SUD, substance use disorder.
The virtual space is accessed through an AR device, via a totem, any physical object that provides comfort. Meetings take place in the dollhouse, behind safe curtains. Interactions will be monitored and the data from past meetings, together with medical history will be safely stored. The project improves both the architectural genericness of physical meetings, together with the condition of the impersonal zoom calls. Virtuality will allow for a stronger and wider community to be connected.
Virtual Justice : Courts of the Future
This project proposes a speculation on courts of the future which will be based in a virtual reality platform with an assumption that virtual technologies will become mainstream in the civic spaces.
It manages criminal activities committed in virtual realm through jury trials, asking how to create legal environment that can help to encourage civic engagement and improve decision-making.
By providing a new medium for evidences and testimonies - immersive re-enactment and allowing public to access all the collected cases and their verdicts, virtual courts will pave its way to set a precedent for future cases and to establish its own regulatory frameworks for in-world social interactions and subsequent social harms.
Why Smash the Lump
"The Lump" refers to the paying of building workers by lump sums for a job instead of union rates on national terms and conditions.
The project explores the design of a virtual civic space for the social organisation of labour in the construction industry - for the ultimate purpose of improving well-being of workers. It explores concepts such as digital twins, spatial cartograms and immersive data visualisation.
Construction sites are self-organised by similarity and affinity - real world geolocations are altered in order to convey information of alternative variables. Gathering spaces for workers emerge out of the spatial cartogram, serving as an alternative platform to traditional union structures.
The Virtual Unconscious
The Virtual Unconscious is an architectural space accessed through an augmented reality device that is a synthesis of people's Internet shadows. It is a place where groups can gather to discuss their views and psyches, hopefully in a more truthful and free manner, as well as hedonistically immerse into their spatialized data.
Weaving Togetherness
This project aims to address discourse on material exploration in virtual space. What is a safe space in the metaverse? What constructs a safe space in the virtual world and what makes it a safe gathering?
The core focus is on virtual materiality and how it could mediate to draw relationships between spaces and the identity performance of its inhabitants. Metaphor is a strong tool to construct the symbolic and psychological togetherness of the virtual space. Through the form of weaving, collectively create a safe fabric in the speculative future for the minority group in Beijing, where the ultimate building material is the togetherness of its user.
Paper Trails
Paper Trails is a knowledge world that provokes the status quo of epistemological elitism and incomplete ontological frameworks of knowledge that define contemporary academic structures.
These academic structures will be analyzed, fragmented, and critically repurposed for their meaningful components as new futures are built to address the ubiquity of digital environments and notions of citizenship within them.
The Civic Datascape: A New Ecology of Care
In a future where spatial computing is ubiquitous, creating a civic infrastructure for the Immersive Internet will emerge as an urban design concern. Sited within Singapore, the project lays the ground for the evolution of a new taxonomy of data-bearing virtual plants. Acts of gardening form the framework for the reading, writing and execution of geospatial data within the generative landscape. Provided with the tools to care for the city's digital contents, a new kind of civic space emerges, where citizens can collectively influence the taxonomy of the information landscape through everyday action.
Library of Narratives
The human need to gather and share stories has become commercialised; and with it, rules and licenses. On one hand, there are richer stories from the control of a canon storyline, but on the other, it is only told through one party's eyes, a lack of involvement and diversity.
The proposal is a space that allows both. The respect to the sovereignty of a copyrighted narrative but also giving space for exploration from other narrators irrespective of experience and knowledge.
It is a space that allows people to produce and consume narratives through time and genres, and maybe one day, contribute to this ever-growing narrative. To let time and experiences weave the library into a narrative of its own through spaces and journeys.
Home(school)
In the re-envisioning of this monastic education, home(school) is a virtual schooling system which brings forward the generous nature of temple schools, temple architecture and roen thai housing typologies, to provide a decentralized education to all children regardless of gender and location, set in the future where access to internet and AR headsets are readily available.
The Crafting Diaspora
This project is trying to seize the core of the ritual of Dong’s gathering, the synchrony, and maintain their ethnic identity, regain the sense of community belonging through virtual crafting. It provides possibility for remote access and multiple ways of experiencing the village, creates new form of business, for the villagers to make a living, and makes it possible to share instead of sell your traditions with dignity.
