Eric Corriel Studios

multidisciplinary art studio • immersive and interactive public art • art activism • digital/electronic art • nyc

Citysphere

Interactive video installation, 2013

Daytime photograph from behind a window which shows a reflection of we're not quite sure what but it's a large multi-colored, digital/futuristic looking disc-shaped orbital rendering of an urban landscape that takes up the majority of the center of the image. On the other side of the looking glass are five youngish looking people, all peering into this mysterious visual simulacra.
Photo by Brett Wood

Citysphere reflects the activity of its environment through the lens of an urban kaleidoscope Shown in Roger Smith Hotel, Manhattan, New York and the Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn, New York

Citysphere is an interactive video installation intent on discovering beauty in mundane urban experiences.

Photograph of a screen showing a kaleidoscope of infinite-mirror-esque concentric discs, each one subdivided into multiple tranches that show the same image, albeit rotated by a consistent amount across the disc. In this case, the image that gets repeated across all discs is a person’s black and white striped t-shirt, lending the overall image a very zebra-stripe-like quality.
Photo by Brett Wood

Living in a large city can be overwhelming at times. There’s an overabundance of visual stimuli from just about every direction. Most of us have gotten into the habit of putting on metaphorical blinders every time we leave our apartments to survive the onslaught.

Photograph of a person wearing a dark hat and sunglasses walking up a crowded city block with their head turned towards a storefront window in which a screen displays a kaleidoscopic series of concentric discs, each slice a vibrant, highly contrasted image. Behind the person, far in the background, is a bridge.
Photo by Brett Wood

The vast majority of what we do see are man-made rectilinear objects—buildings, billboards, sidewalk squares, crosswalks, subway cars, don’t walk signs, elevators, office doors, computer screens. For anyone who’s lived in a large city long enough, the thought of finding beauty in one’s daily experiences can start to seem foreign after a while.

Citysphere at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City

In the same way that one might find beauty in an ordinary leaf by focusing intently on its cellular structure, Citysphere zooms in on a tiny piece of the urban landscape in the hopes of revealing something beautiful about the larger picture.

Citysphere is created with custom software written by the artist in OpenFrameworks. The software takes a single webcam feed and splits it into 529 mini-feeds, which are then mapped onto the surface of a sphere. It’s first incarnation was shown every night from December 4 to January 22, 2014, at the Roger Smith Hotel (Window at 125). It was also shown at the 2015 edition of the Dumbo Arts Festival in Brooklyn, New York.

Video interview by the Roger Smith Hotel, 2013
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