‘Walking City’ by Universal Everything

Walking City is a continuation of Universal Everything‘s artistic line of enquiry, investigating human movement, emotional design, architecture and sound. It is inspired by the sense of walking through a city, how absorbing your surroundings alters sensation and emotion. How you become part of the fabric of the city, a man-made eco system. Referencing the utopian visions of 1960s architecture practice Archigram, Walking City is a slowly evolving video sculpture. The language of materials and patterns seen in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city endlessly walks, adapting to the environments it encounters. What appears as a 3D person, shrouded in a digital costume, shifts and breaks, reshapes and endlessly evolves into a video sculpture continuously walking in the center of the screen: creating an artificial form whose movement feels alive, not synthetic. It explores the structural processes found in modern architecture, which have led to a multitude of aesthetic outcomes. From Buckminster Fuller’s domes to Richard Rogers’ inside out buildings, Daniel Liebskind’s angular public museums to Future Systems’ biomorphic structures. Created using Houdini, Walking City utilizes a procedural process to seamlessly change into different costumes—moving from faceted shapes, through contours and brutalism—as the walk cycle anchors the piece.

CREDITS
Creative Director: Matt Pyke
Animation: Chris Perry
Sound design: Simon Pyke (Freefarm)