#blinking city

[design-china]

More on Instant Hutong

Beijing-based Instant Hutong are hosting an open day at their studios from 2pm tomorrow (17 October 2015). They will also be displaying and selling pieces from their Blinking City project. Find the studio address via their website.

[blinkingcity-blog]

Giacomo Callo: The Books of the Deep Sea Diver

Our new film is finally online. We entered into the world of Giacomo Callo; the independent works of MAS-213 and the profession of Art Director for the publishing house Mondadori.

Watch the film on Blinking City.

[xclamationmk]

Blinking City by Instant Hutong

[design-china]

Blinking City Exhibition

Blinking City, an exhibition and pop-up shop by Instant Hutong for Beijing Design Week 2012, surrounded visitors with interactive maps and urban patterns that "progressively define an aesthetic merging form and colour inspired by a nomadic and itinerant urban geography". The background wall displayed 32 new digital prints of a Beijing mapped onto lenticular panels, which varied according to the movement of the viewer. Read more via Dezeen.

[mapsandraps]

Blinking City

For today's Mapping Monday, I wanted to share this pretty stencil map from Blinking City, showing several neighborhoods in Beijing.

The project highlights areas of  "fast pace transformation" that change faster than you can record them--"As soon as the map is done, the city it describes has already gone." 

For every advantage of instantaneous mapping through the internet or GIS, I think there's a slight shift away from the quality of maps through more tangible media. Despite the ease of digitizing information, having it updated regularly, and enabling global access to it (even by tweeting our friendships, blogging our thoughts, digitizing our surroundings), there's still something enjoyable about preserving the quality of something a little more tangible. 

We've forgotten--not all awesome maps are on paper. Some of the best are through the most unexpected ways! We can still value paper as a great medium (like this paper cut map), but what about legos, wooden words, magnetic puzzles, or a cement wall? 

--S (Images via Instant Hutong, StudioKMO, Palomar, Roberto Bosco, Sally Gao, Steven Mattern)

[welcometosuburbia-blog]

BlinkingCity is a unique collaboration between game designer Eric Zimmerman and architect Nathalie Pozzi. The pair created this colorful abstract collage using several maps from the rapidly transforming Hutong neighborhoods in Beijing. Here’s how they describe it:

Blinking City is a project investigating the inadequacy of traditional maps for city environments characterized by fast pace transformation and urban growth. As soon as the map is done, the city it describes has already gone. We transferred one of the Blinking City pattern, based on a collage of several Hutong neighbourhoods of Beijing, onto a wall of a dilapidated courtyard house in Xianyukou district, located in the core of the city.

[redeyednblue]

Blinking City is a project "investigating the inadequacy of traditional maps for city environments characterized by fast pace transformation and urban growth". As quickly as you create a map, the city has already changed. Artist Instant Hutong has begun making stencils of the neighborhoods of Beijing and posting them around the city. More to come...

[galletica]