110 - 09|09|09

POROSITY STUDIO
Radical Transformations: Crossing Cultures, Bodies and Cities,
Donghua University, Shanghai
September 14-28, 2009

For two weeks in September 2009 more than sixty art, design, and architecture students, practitioners and academics will work on a live design brief in an intensive two-week studio at Donghua University, Shanghai. e-SCAPE is a partnership between Professor Richard Goodwin’s Porosity Studio, and The Collabor8 Project (C8), in collaboration with Donghua University (Shanghai) and COFA (Sydney).

http://porosity.c8.omnium.net.au

Shanghai e-Scape provokes new approaches to a range of problems and scales in the city. The title alludes to environmental landscapes and the notion of a “scape” or perspective on an issue and the possibility of escape. This escape may be a response to the problem or the predicament we now find ourselves in with the approaching GFC or it may be a solution in the form of an “e-scape” or new landscape. There is the potential for aspects of this “scape” to be permeated by the data-driven, ambient and ubiquitous ‘digital’ networks spanning the city in an increasingly complex invisible matrix. Interpretations might include development of strategies for mapping the virtual, invisible and online dimensions of the “digital city” considering the potential of these emergent spaces, how they might be used and how they intersect with the ‘real’ urban landscape.
This 2009 Session 2 studio will be held at Dong Hua University in Shanghai in the second half of September. The project presents a series of sites close to the University campus which summarise a range of city scales within which the artist/designer/architect might work.
The Porosity Studio always asks that you the student bring to this forum your own particular spacial intelligence and a type of practice or range of disciplines which inform your work to date.
The challenge then is to test these faculties at a different scale – the scale of the city. You are also challenged to work in a collaborative way and across disciplines as you choose. There is significant opportunity to explore notions of contemporary practice in mixed reality contexts to collaborate digitally. Collaboration is very much encouraged but not demanded. It remains your choice.
Via a series of early presentations both in the studio and online, including an initial “Pecha Kucha” styled event, you will witness each other’s backgrounds and concepts and be able to strike up relationships which seem most appropriate to your project.
The location of Dong Hua University is situated within some of the most elevated freeway junctions and dense high-rise architecture of Shanghai. Remnants of low rise housing exist which are either dilapidated or in transition adjacent to early high-rise housing and new commercial high-rise. Ancient Hutong areas are also within walking distance.

Five prospective sites have been chosen for consideration in terms of transformation or other interactions.

The studio is not looking for Utopian visions for Shanghai. It seeks your engagement within the laboratory of interdisciplinary design and Shanghai as a city. This engagement involves the selection of a site or scale at which to work and for you to write your own brief for an imagined project. This project should seek to find immediate solutions or ways forward for an existing problem or “scape”.