Tivon Rice & WeiHaw Wang (US/TW/JP): REGROWTH: For Toad Hill

REGROWTH began as a networked collaboration and a series of conversations about the history, architecture, and visual situation in Toad Hill, Taipei. This virtual, remote investigation was then catalyzed through a number of site-visits that aimed to identify the different forces, textures, and traces of occupancy present in that space. Our exploring, photographing, and mapping of the neighborhood during a two-week period in Summer 2016 thus became a discursive platform – a vehicle for learning about Toad Hill’s built environment and its precarious position between the growth of modern Taipei, and the decay caused by time and the encroaching subtropical forest.

The resulting installation can be seen not only as a document of the shape and texture of this situation, but also a reflection of our collaborative relationship with Toad Hill – which began in a highly virtualized space but ultimately converged upon the very real site. For the project’s texture, we use photogrammetry, a technique which analyzes adjacent site photos to establish their depth dimension and ultimately merges large amount of information into a textured, 3D map. These photos were taken both from the ground as well as from an aerial platform, a drone. For the shape, we established a system (conceptually trying to mimic what photogrammetry does) that converts meshed faces into a controllable density of rods and hubs. The system merges small meshes into large ones, or subdivides large mesh into small ones.

Commissioned for Space Media Festival 2016 (Taipei) and Modern Body Festival 2016 (The Hague).

Installation: Acrylic, 3d printed polyethylene, photogrammetric digital animation, sound

Date
2 & 3 December

Time
12h-20h

Venue
Paviljoen Baruch (Gemak)

Module
Exhibition
MBF x DEZACT

Links

Tivon Rice
Wei-Haw Wang

BIOS

tivon-rice-portrait

Tivon Rice‘s (US) work critically explores representation and communication in the context of digital technologies. Both fascinated with and wary of the speed of televisual media, Rice creates systems that pair immediate materials such as light, space, and tangible forms with live and recorded sound and video. While his practice is primarily concerned with emerging social relationships to digital technology, Rice draws heavily from art historical themes. In doing so, he examines the conditions of surrealist and minimalist attitudes in contemporary new-media arts. Rice is a 2011-12 Fulbright Scholar, and a PhD candidate at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media, where he teaches courses in Video Art and Installation.

Wei-Haw Wang

Wei-Haw Wang (TW/JP/UK) is a Taiwanese-born British architect who has spent most of his professional career in the UK. He is currently based in Taiwan and Japan, and is the director of Sawara architectural firm. While his private practice deals with smaller residential projects, he also provides technical consultation for the parametric and computational departments of other architectural corporations. He has conducted computational design workshops for MTech, Architectural Association (AA), and London Metropolitan University in 2009. While at KPF London, he also worked on various architectural projects involving parametric design – an airport terminal, a football stadium, a mixed-use high rise, and private space installations. Wei-Haw graduated with an MArch from The Bartlett School of Architecture in London (UCL).