Physical bodies occupying one actual space at a time but being simultaneously connected to and existing in many others through cameras, networks, and screens has become the most iconic reality of the modern city. This ongoing project explores this multiplicity of presence by overlapping two types of camera spaces: one evidenced in photos captured at various locations in the city, and the other dynamically related to its citizens within their personal spaces. The project responds to shifted styles of living and working since the pandemic lockdown by imagining the webcam as a seeing / drawing / living machine, a mediator between the space in front and the space behind (inside) the computer screen.

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Functioning as a tool for virtual face-to-face communications, a webcam is typically placed in relevant locations to a monitor so that it’s capable of transmitting visual signals with aligned gazes, imitating the real eye contact. Thus, the webcam space consists of part of the real world with mass and solidity, and the networked virtual space in real time, reflecting what Toyo Ito remarks on space in the electronic age that it “no longer appears to be a vacuum in which solid bodies live, but rather, a medium through which information is diffused”.

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The project surveys daily life activities in the shifted pandemic culture to reshape the city as fictions of individuals using computational drawing and mapping techniques. Ordinary action sequences around digital devices are reassembled into surreal scenarios and translated into dynamic illusory textures on various forms, through which we reimagine domestic spaces as screens and animations for a playful and imaginary future. 

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