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