installation + lecture
installation + lecture
Hybrid Space Lab
CITY_KIT: An online DIY kit for your neighbourhood
Playing Hybrid Space Lab’s game CITY_KIT, you adapt a digital version of your local surroundings according to your desires. In a switch from changes in the neighbourhood that are beyond your control, CITY_KIT makes you the architect, urban planner, environmental expert or designer. CITY_KIT is currently shown with a presentation and demo version and soon you will be able to play and experience the game at Platform21 during Checking Reality.
Hybrid Space Lab is a laboratory and network in which landscape and building architects, environmental planners, hard- and software engineers, and designers collaborate in the development of projects for combined analog and digital, urban, architectural, design and media spaces. Their projects range from urban games and urban planning to buildings, architectural interiors and industrial design applications and wearables.
When they play the CITY_KIT game, residents can adapt and improve their local physical environment by building a digital version of their neighborhood.
This urban game revolves around city planning, redevelopment and building processes. Using modular building components that can be moved around and fixed in certain places in the environment, users can build micro-stages, exhibition decks, floating bars and theatres, WCs, swimming pools and other recreational facilities that make living in the neighborhood more fun.
CITY_KIT is an open-source medium in which participants can add elements and share their designs. An online platform in the form of a website allows residents to actively take part in the game. All it takes is a simple click of the mouse to interactively test your own virtual version of CITY_KIT.
CITY_KIT of the Day is a contest under way on the website. Residents and game users can design their own objects and facilities; the winner gets a chance to actually carry out his or her idea.
On the website, the user can also pinpoint exactly where a digital object would be located in the analogue world. This can be done using a mobile phone, RFID or a GPS system.
Making small modifications to the personal, physical environment in digital space changes the experience of living in the real world. This is the goal of CITY_KIT: to help you to revalue your local surroundings and incorporate the new, imaginative layers created in CITY_KIT’s virtual world.
Hybrid Space Lab is an initiative of Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar (Amsterdam/Berlin) focusing on the hybrid areas that arise through the combination and fusion of environments, objects and services in the contemporary information and communication age.
www.hybridspacelab.net
