https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_R9EyJdaYI

Virgo City

CLIENT

MEDIUM

RESPONSIBILITIES

SKILLS

TASK

A 25-minute video installation exploring the shortcomings of smart cities, blending fiction and reality based on three ongoing sites in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Nigeria.

APPROACH

The story was built through digital world-building and photogrammetry in Unity, revealing how techno-utopian “smart cities” become catalysts for land dispossession, environmental degradation and social inequality.

RESULT

Shown at the KABK Graduation Show 2021, shining light on the issues that remain for those left behind the walls of technological progress.

Virgo City explores the shortcomings of smart cities through a story that blends fiction and reality based on three ongoing sites in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Nigeria. The project aims to shine light on the issues that remain for those left behind the walls of technological progress.

Rarely differentiable and often conceived by the same multinational corporations, hundreds of hi-tech urban enclaves are emerging around the world. These so-called smart cities are branded as the ultimate techno-utopias, hosting gated communities of tax-exempt free trade, tech-enabled convenience and carbon-neutral living for the global rich. Although often promoted as a solution to the world’s urban ills like overcrowding, unemployment and pollution, these cities often turn out to be catalysts for land dispossession, environmental degradation and social inequality.