Cities are places where different classes, ethnic groups and multicultural ideas meet. They are all connected to each other through the city and use common infrastructure and technologies. The premise of the complexity hypothesis is that this will produce an enormous concentration of knowledge in the urban environment. For example, if the ideas and data that are present today in the rush hour in the center of large cities were to come together and be exchanged, a high degree of creativity could result. In tomorrow’s megacities even more people will live together in a restricted space. The inevitable consequence of this is increased exchanges and potential for innovation.

Hypothesis 3: Complexity

„The city is the most complex entity humans have ever created. It is full of individuals in intensely specialized roles, connected to multiple overlapping local systems and supported by massive amounts of collective infrastructure and technology that interact in massively complex ways. This biodiversity and complexity drives the growth that triggers evolution in a relentless feedback loop. Each corner of this unimaginably complex system can trigger transformative and irreversible change. When asked what a city is, architect Louis Kahn said ‚It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life’.

Cities are full of people from all walks of life, places in which different classes, ethnicities, and ideas come together. As a measure of a collective intelligence, complexity is a measure of cities. Like cholesterol, there are good and bad forms of complexity in the city. Sociocultural richness, diversity, and open, easily fixable and modifiable forms of technology produce a complexity that allows cities to be more productive and resilient. Rising bureaucracy, incompatible closed technologies, and barriers to entry produce a negative complexity, making cities more vulnerable in an era of growing threats such as extreme climate events, urban warfare, and terrorism. As systems come to rely on systems, cascading failures can occur, producing accidents like the meltdown at Fukushima, the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon, or the Flash Crash, in which a series of weaknesses in related systems creates an event that spirals out of control.

Highly complex systems, in other words, are extremely vulnerable to stress. Just as the brain is the organ that is most demanding of energy, complexity demands massive amounts of resources. When civilizations fail to meet these demands, they collapse. When they do, however, their cities are places of the most immense vitality, allowing a diversity of exchange unmatched in human history. Extreme Cities maximize complexity, and foster new forms of complexity.“

^{Columbia University}

Read more about the 'Extreme Cities Project’ and the five hypotheses.

The efficiency and productivity of large cities is based on, amongst other things, “generosity”. The urban space promotes collaboration. It is easier to make contacts and take up spontaneous offers. This in turn can improve the city itself. The coincidental nature of contacts between people provides new impulses and new ideas. “Extreme cities” gain generosity by promoting new forms of collaboration: where today small community gardens are planted cooperatively, tomorrow there could be a place where the harvested products supply the neighborhood.

Hypothesis 5: Generosity

„From the start, cities have been places of giving. A key reason that cities grow is because they are environments of generosity. While each city is marked by ways in which it can neglect people, each is also uniquely generous. Part of the extraordinary efficiency and productivity of cosmopolitan density is this often overlooked dimension of unexpected generosity. Each city is full of openings. The city is by definition a place of coexistence, of sharing one’s environment with other people. It has prospered because people interact and that these interactions defy prediction or regulation. Its culture is based on exchange, the transaction of ideas and knowledge that always exceeds the apparent limits.

In each dimension of the city there is an unexpected openness, generosity or support that triggers an equally unexpected growth in the city itself. And the city propels itself forward because every act of generosity benefits the giver and receiver. Giving generates capital in the form of knowledge for both the giver and receiver. Unlike financial or political capital, the capital of a gift doesn't get depleted. Rather it accumulates for both parties. When a giver provides to a recipient, the recipient receives aid, but also knowledge, and the implied invitation to contribute, the invitation to be active in the city. As a model of exchange it illustrates the positive dimension of the city’s 'transactional capacity,’ demonstrating just how invaluable interaction is culturally and socially. Extreme cities grow stronger by fostering new forms of generosity."

^{Columbia University}

Read more about the 'Extreme Cities Project’ and the five hypotheses.

The courage to rethink and challenge the established is a decisive prerequisite for this continual advancement and the core of our corporate culture.

The Winner J. Mayer H.

The Jury's Statement

Mayer’s project focuses on digital technology, but with a difference: The starting point is an existing urban environment. This leads to interesting, unexpected results. Technology here does not determine outcomes, but becomes an instrument for opening up urban space to multiple interventions, meanings, possibilities. One of these effects is to make room in our dense cities, room for diverse uses. This way of conceiving of technology urbanizes technology, and in this urbanizing of technology also lies a project of humanizing our cities.

Winner Jürgen Mayer H. and CEO Rupert Stadler at the ceremony holding the award.

© Audi Urban Future Initiative

For more information about Jürgen Mayer H. and his concept go to his personal website http://www.jmayerh.com/ or to the article A.Way».

The City of the future will be many things at once - the most important theses of the Audi Urban Future Award 2010:

01 Free of barriers – Seamless City
The urban mobility of the future will be organized barrier-free to a much greater extent than it is today. In the city centers pedestrians, cyclists, cars and public transport will share the public space that is available to them. Road boundaries, road signs and traffic lights will be superfluous, because all participants in traffic will be electronically networked with each other and each participant’s need for space will be continuously determined. In this way frozen structures in the urban space will come into flow.

02 Owned by its inhabitants – Reconfigured City
Optimized systems of mobility will increasingly permit free areas to emerge within the city. This will make it possible for the city to grow inwards and for certain areas to become denser. At the same time “green zones” for recreation but also for food production will arise in particular places. Calmed districts will furthermore enable their residents to combine work and leisure pleasantly and to carry out their daily tasks and business in a relaxed manner.

03 Interconnected – Networked City
In the future the city will be characterized to a high degree by different kinds of network. Everything will be connected with everything else by control loops. Automated travel, energy management, personalized electronic systems and digital social networks will play a leading role. This will go hand in hand with a radically changed perception of urban space. In the networked city all participants in traffic will, on the one hand, cooperatively control their interaction, and on the other hand they will all be enabled to create their individual view of the city.

04 A place of neighborly cooperation – Social City
Social interaction will be intensified, because the city of the future will consist of many heterogeneous areas instead of forming a homogeneous unit. New neighborhoods, and new forms of cooperation within these new neighborhoods, will emerge. Be it car sharing, urban gardening or neighborhood assistance, social exchange and common use will take the place of individual ownership in some fields

“The transformation of the city is a central theme for the future. Whereas the automobile has thus far shaped the appearance of cities, in the future it could be a city’s structure that determines which types of mobility are developed. The future is shaped on the one hand by architects, and by mobility providers on the other. With the Audi Urban Future Award, we want to bring both areas together and initiate a serious examination and discussion.”
_{Christian Gärtner, Member of the Management Board, Stylepark AG}

The most important steps of the Award 2010 ».

The participating architects of the Award 2010 are the following:

• Alison Brooks Architects »
• BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group »
• Cloud 9 »
• J. Mayer H. Architects »
• Standardarchitecture ».

In 2012 there has been a growing number of experimental projects that explore the creative potential of mobile devices. Some examples can be found at iphoneart.org. Many of these projects may fall into the field research and development, but certainly others are better contextualized in terms of art and design. One can think of these projects as an emerging attitude in creativity that can be referenced as mobile aesthetics.

Artist and developer Jonah Brucker-Cohen has been monitoring the development of art applications since the early days of the iPhone. Some of the mobile apps that according to him are worthy of note include: Eliss (2009) by Steph Thirion, which is a type of game. It consists of abstract geometric objects and sounds which the user can put together in different configurations. Another is Reality Jockey (2009) by RJDJ, an app that creates soundscapes based on the user’s activities throughout the day. The sounds can be uploaded to a server and given a URL which then can be shared with friends. What these and other mobile applications make evident is that mashing together elements of the world around us with pre-configured algorithms developed by the artist has become a specific act of aesthetic exploration that is clearly linked to our constant physical movement.

More recent apps explore the reconfiguration of actual environments. Field (2011) by Rainer Kohlberger, for example, creates real-time visualizations of anything that is in front of the iPad’s camera. The possible pre-defined patterns are an interpretation of image and sound; in this case the options of interaction for the user are basically limited to moving the tablet around, and to switching between different patterns.

A distorted reality generated from the mobile camera feed—the Field application by Rainer Kohlberger.

© Rainer Kohlberger

The concept of representing the real world in patterns, however, is taken a step further by artist and programmer Stephan Maximilian Huber in his iPad and iPhone application titled Konfetti (2012), which is designed specifically to engage users with the environment by enabling them to compose a unique semi-abstract image. Seconds after the app is launched, confetti-like objects appear with a color value corresponding to the elements originally visualized on the screen. Huber explains that, at the threshold where art, design, and technology merge, “working with dots is quite common, as it's the simplest form of a pixel on screen, an inkjet-dot on a paper.” The result is a pointillist image, reminiscent of the work of French painter George Seurat’s impressionist work, such as A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), or The Bathers at Asnières (1884). Unlike a traditional pointillist painting, however, the user can touch the screen and push the pixel-like “confetti” around, thereby creating ephemeral abstract compositions that are truly unique to the moment of interaction. Huber is quite aware of the expressive potential in this simple gesture, as he adds that Konfetti turns the user into an art producer because “every frame is unique, a snapshot of time and space, not reproducible. Although you can copy the file, you can't copy the situation in front of the camera to get the same output. It's like taking a Polaroid picture in the old days.”

There are quite a few innovative things in Stephan Maximilian Huber’s application—he himself regards it as mobile art. This exposes a new paradigm shift in production that is clearly linked to the emerging aesthetics of mobility, and changes the way art is produced, experienced and even marketed, especially in the ever-ephemeral field of new media. One of the challenges of new media in the past has been its ambiguous and at times ambivalent relationship with the gallery system, in part because of the limitation of selling information-based art in a market driven by the commodification of unique objects. Huber in this regard explains that new media art has resolved these issues to some degree, but mobile art applications are different: “The main difference between media art and mobile art is distribution: you can sell a media art installation in a limited edition to art buyers, but nobody will pay for an art application which costs more than 5 dollars. But the interesting part is that you are not limited to museums or galleries to show your work.”

Konfetti by Stephan Maximilian Huber.

© Stephan Maximilian Huber

What is interesting with this emerging trend is that the user can experience the artist’s interpretation of the world within a localized setting. In other words, mobile art applications, such as Huber’s and others mentioned here, expand the possibilities in art practice beyond a gallery space—not only to the localities where the artist may work, but also to any place in the world where the application can be downloaded via Apple’s iTunes store. Aesthetics, as often discussed in the art world and reserved for well-controlled spaces, is extended here to the public space, which begins to function as a type of private space on the go. The aesthetics of mobility, then, is bridging or perhaps even blurring the separation of the real world and the art space.

Consequently, the concept of mobility, which helped art become popular thanks to the portable canvas and gave us important works, particularly impressionist paintings, under the term en plein air, has moved on to become embedded in the very devices we use for daily communication. The user is currently able to participate in the making of art by way of inverting one of the most forbidden gestures, an act that has defined the museum for centuries: whereas it is not allowed to touch art in the museum, compositions by art applications, in direct opposition, cannot be created unless the screen is touched.

With mobile art applications, such as Huber’s, anyone using a tablet or a smartphone can download software that offers art on the go—and this does not necessarily imply fast food by any means. If anything, art apps may offer much-needed moments of high aesthetic quality to a growing global culture that thrives on speed and efficiency.

Konfetti is an application for smartphone that uses a distortion filter to get new visuals taken from the mobiel camera feed; by Stephan Maximilian Huber.

© Stephan Maximilian Huber

Johannesburg is full of artistic communities especially associated with audio-visual production and digital media. Hubs of small groups meet in coffee houses or temporary meeting points, but they don’t have a chance to organize themselves for medium- or long-term collaborations. To bring these topics to the streets and communicate their needs, A Maze. Interact created a scenario for these people. It has the potential to develop into a hotspot of digital culture in the future. The festival aimed to raise questions at the crossroads of development aid and artistic entrepreneurship.

On the way from the airport, the first impression of Johannesburg is that of fractured and detached districts and areas connected by massive highways. The streets seem vast and lifeless; they exude a feeling of emptiness. Passengers hide in their cars—the only places they feel safe. The spirit awoken during the 2010 football World Cup is still visible in the infrastructure: Now in the form of hardly used stadiums, abandoned access roads, and rarely frequented new bus lines.

The festival’s center, The Grove, a building complex in the central Braamfontein district, presents a stark contrast to the surrounding flagship stores, buildings decorated with media façades, coffee shops and restaurants. In the middle of this gentrified spot it is a beautiful theater that hosts and displays a conference, an exhibition, workshops, screenings, and concerts.

A MAZE. Interact Festival, Concert Night with live act Dokta SpiZEE from Johannesburg.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

The goal of the A Maze. Interact festival is to inject impulses into an emerging cultural media network between Africa and Europe. The festival’s catalog states that it is about the creation of a sustainable platform for interdisciplinary expertise, such as media art, game theory and design, modding culture, DIY games, cultural and postcolonial studies, and fosters a playful yet serious exchange. That just sounds too easy.

Game art uses the method of the “magic circle” that was coined by a Dutch cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga, in 1938. He is known for his groundbreaking book on the playful human, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Huizinga popularized the theory of play and ritual being closely connected. Certain playful rituals, or behaviors, are required to provide fluid and immersive interactions for the participants. These are the prerequisites for cultural development.

Take, for example, Flipside, a game project by the Berlin-based site-specific game collective Invisible Playground and performance artist Anthea Moys. The setting consists of small teams who have to run through the streets. They get dramaturgical instructions and have to unravel challenges. Based on the simple green-box system used in movie production the players carry a green-painted panel on which video sequences from Berlin are keyed in. The different teams have to cast pedestrians and re-enact the scenes from Berlin in front of the panel. In this way they create small film clips.

The street game Flipside connects the Johannesburg players with Berlin using a "Teleportation Ritual."

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

With the street game Flipside the players walk around carrying a mobile green screen as sort of a game board. They fulfill tasks in front of the screen on which sequences from Berlin are keyed in.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

This seems rather complex. However it becomes a funny quest and a joyful communication setting for the players. They encounter unforeseen situations and open up for new interaction possibilities. This generates an emotional connection.

This game played in public space involves more than just the players—it intervenes in the public space, affecting walkers and shopkeepers. It interrupts the day-to-day interactions of pedestrians, who are not prepared for such gamification, a recent trend that describestheinjection of playful approaches to daily life.

The idea behind this game is that it is played both in Johannesburg and in Berlin, in order to investigate possible connections and/or misconnections between the two cities. Although Flipside might need technical improvement, it proves that its experience design, which is embedded in urban gaming, carries potential for social connectedness.

In a different way, the conference and discussion panels at the festival showed how playfulness and complex issues can be knitted together. Diverse topics dealt with the notion of space and how its parameters are transformed through location-based mobile services and augmented reality technologies. Although it is easy for the inhabitants of Johannesburg to get access to technology nowadays, how could they get access to peer groups and communities? The panel discussions between international speakers and an interested, talkative South African audience were dominated by suggestions and opportunities for possible collaborations.

Another issue that was raised several times was that the city as a temporary playground for cultural development has to take into account the specific local conditions and frameworks which have historically grown within the city. This leaves the discussion quickly at a dead end if the participants lack an understanding of the local conditions and historical facts. Dealing with the fact that interaction does not necessarily need a common ground—but common goals—the playful approach extends to the self-organization of individuals and groups: co-creation hubs such as shared offices, servers and meeting points are locally emerging for game developers, music journalists and artists in South Africa. However they can only operate on a backend infrastructure, with funding, or business options. This kind of trial-and-error set of interactions can open up intercultural communication. It is set in an experimental playground that investigates a possible future state of co-development and knowledge exchange. A Maze. Interact took a small step in this direction.

A MAZE. Jump'n' Run Party at Alexander Theatre with Game Boy live act Meneo from Barcelona.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

Guests at A MAZE. Jump'n' Run Party at Alexander Theatre. 

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

The Centro Cultural São Paulo is located on the border between the Paraíso (“Paradise”) and Liberdade (“Freedom”) neighborhoods and connected to the Vergueiro Metro station. The origins of the sloped site alongside 23 de Maio Avenue, São Paulo’s main north-south axis, date back to the 1970s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship period. A leftover parcel created by the construction of two systems of mobility, the city's Metro and express highway, it had been slated for large-scale commercial development, but the new mayor at the time, Olavo Setubal, decided to focus the city’s commercial development in the Paulista Avenue area and dedicate the Paraíso-Liberdade site to cultural programming.

The Centro Cultural São Paulo is sited alongside 23 de Maio Avenue, São Paulo’s main north-south axis.

© Ligia Nobre

Designed by architects Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Telles in 1982, the 46,500-square-meter CCSP celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2012. Its multiple uses include a public library, theater, cinema, spaces for performances and workshops, classrooms, visual-arts galleries, garden, and restaurant. There are common areas to rest, study, talk, sleep, relax, see friends, sit quietly, play chess, listen to music, watch films, attend theatrical performances, draw, read, and dance. As Christoph Grafe and Andre Leirner argue in “Public Landscapes,” a 2001 article about the CCSP in OASE #57, “The concept of a public building as a series of interconnected surfaces and the open but highly differentiated plan and section of the Centro Cultural continue to offer very new and never exhausted possibilities for inhabitation and use which the citizens of São Paulo have learned to accept.”

In a city currently dominated by consumer culture and shopping malls, the Centro Cultural São Paulo is one of the few truly democratic public spaces.

An outdoor space at the Centro Cultural São Paulo.

© Ligia Nobre

Since then Platoon have been trying to win people over—with their approach to art and culture, and their peculiar container architecture. “I really do appreciate this feeling of mobility every day when I open my container box,“ Christoph Frank says. “Often, when I look out of the office window, somebody is taking a picture of me or he or she comes in and starts talking to us. I really like this.“ He never could get used to work in a normal office space again, he adds. Some time after they started Platoon they even set up a swimming pool in one of the containers, but eventually it was too much to maintain, he says.

This summer in cooperation with GRAFT architects, Platoon used thirty-four containers for their latest mobile Kunsthalle architecture in Berlin.

© Platoon

Since this summer Platoon's mobile Kunsthalle architecture hosts various events in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin several times a month.

© Platoon

Certainly, the shipping containers express the very idea of mobility. As flexible modules of a globalized culture, they have a unique construction that can be relocated to any place at any time. Indeed, due to housing developments in Berlin in recent years, Platoon had to move away from their temporary locations twice. And they decided to expand their concept to the South Korean capital and set up another container structure, the Platoon Kunsthalle, in Seoul in April 2009.

"We choose Seoul because it is upcoming, dynamic and economically creative. In Korea people have been extremely open and friendly towards our ideas,“ Christoph Frank says. Platoon’s idea is to serve as the interface between art and money. The agency present art and subculture in their space. Often their related events are paid for by a sponsor—a big street-art-aware brand, such Adidas, Nike, or Camel. Frank, who studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, explains: “It is always a huge challenge to combine the interests of the subculture, our interests and the brand's. Rather than mainstream campaigns we want to host cutting-edge events. It is important how open a brand is towards creative spaces and people. We want to initiate projects that have creativity in both directions: towards the creative people and towards the subculture. Also we want the artists representing the subculture to feel they are taken seriously and not just used for the brand’s purpose.”

For three years the Platoon Kunsthalle was located in an empty parking lot in Seoul's posh Gangnam district. 

 

© Platoon

The concept of the Kunsthalle in Seoul worked in the same as it did in Berlin. They stacked up their containers on an empty space and filled them with content—as a sort of viral performance. As in Berlin they decided not to settle in the artists' district but in a quite posh area instead. For three years the Platoon Kunsthalle was located in a parking lot in the Gangnam district, which lately rose to fame due to K-pop star Psy’s international hit “Gangnam Style”.

Eventually the venue became so popular that it branched out to other Korean cities. In 2010, in a joint effort with the South Korean government, Platoon opened the Kunsthalle Gwangju, which consisted of twenty-nine recyclable containers arranged as a cube with their façades painted in sophisticated-looking black. Its 1,000 square meters of floor space housed a concert stage, an art library, lounge areas, and a huge video wall for multimedia installations.

Finally this summer the Kunsthalle Seoul moved to Berlin and joined forces with the office to form an impressive container ensemble of thirty-four pieces. The construction, which was built in cooperation with GRAFT architects, is now located in the Prenzlauer Berg district.

Christoph and Tom, the two founders, invested one million euros in their new Kunsthalle Berlin, which will be their home for the next two years—at least. Bearing the full risk, they hope to refinance it. Despite public funding Berlin is always short of money to support independent artists and projects. Thus Platoon aims to fill a gap.

At the moment Platoon is hosting several events per month, such as talks about street art and gentrification. At the same time they are displaying street art by local artists in their window front facing the street. However there are already plans for further expansion. Christoph says, "Mexico City will be next, and then maybe Tel Aviv, or Moscow. We don't know yet." So watch out for their signature stacked ISO shipping containers—Platoon may soon come to your neighborhood.

"We found sponsors who allowed us to put our containers there—for free. Despite the fact that it was a daily parking lot and they were making a huge profit," Christoph Frank of Platoon agency explains how they found a location for their containers in Seoul, Korea.

© Platoon

The interior of Platoon Kunsthalle in Seoul.

© Platoon

Take New York-based designer Alexander Chen, who created an interactive visualization of the New York subway lines. Conductor is a sound-reactive application that displays how New York subway trains drive along their routes in real time. The length of one line before its next turn on the map defines its pitch. Users can interact with this web application and use the lines like strings of a musical instrument to play with. Alexander Chen derived the visualization itself from Italian designer Massimo Vignelli’s famous design classic, the New York subway diagram from 1972.

“The piece follows some rules. Every minute it checks for new trains launched from their end stations. The train then moves towards the end of the line, with its speed set by the schedule’s estimated trip duration. Some decisions were made for musical, aesthetic, and technical reasons, such as fading out routes over time, the gradual time acceleration, and limiting the number of concurrent trains. Some of these limitations result in subtle variations, as different trains are chosen during each 24-hour loop,” Chen explains. He used the train information that is provided as open data by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Like other transit agencies, it has made all of its bus, metro and railway schedules available as an application programming interface (API). With this software communication interface, web services and mobile applications can use the data, for instance to give users constant updates on train timetables and delays.

City Symphonies by Kevin McKeague is a traffic simulation where the synthetic sound produced by electric cars changes its tone according to the car's position on the road and its distance to other vehicles.

© Mark McKeague

A different—but equally visually impressive—kind of urban soundscape was created by London-based Mark McKeague. Newly graduated from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art (RCA), he drew his idea from the premise that, thanks to technology, today’s electric cars are becoming oh-so-quiet. However, in daily practice this hasn’t always proven to be useful. So for a proper driving experience—and to alert pedestrians—electric cars are using synthesized sounds that imitate real engine noise. Mark McKeague’s City Symphonies project is an audible tableau of the traffic flow where the synthetic sounds produced by electric cars alter according to their position in relation to other vehicles on the road. “The roadside becomes a new context for sound—the city is the score,” is how Mark McKeague describes it. “Currently it is based on sequences of cars that move through a city. The cars form themselves into groups travelling in the same direction, the effect being a musical pattern to those standing on the street as the cars pass by. So, for example, with a group of cars passing their tone could be ascending, but other patterns are possible. At junctions things get more complicated as the groups split and join as they move in different directions.”

First he took satellite imagery of several London areas and created vector graphics of the infrastructure. Then he used the generative software Processing to simulate the traffic flows under normal circumstances. McKeague explains, “The sound software MaxMSP generates the sound of each car separately as a constant sound. Then, by using binaural mixing techniques, the sound is simulated moving past the listener, making the sound get louder and quieter as it approaches and moves away—but also the Doppler effect which is the same pitch changing, as we can hear when an ambulance moves past.” Thus the audiovisual map he created is completely modular and could be transferred to any other place, he adds, “What would an American grid-style system sound like? Likewise I would like to experiment with more sound layers, and introduce new environmental factors, such as what it would sound like in the rain.”

Moreover his City Symphonies project tackles a far greater issue that cities are facing: how to deal with traffic noise in the future. Mark says, “We've been a very noisy species since the Industrial Revolution, and potentially this is the first time it is under control. This could lead to interesting changes to the way we think about noise. At the moment it is very much about noise abatement, cars are quite acoustically tuned to sound a specific way—a way of conveying character or power to the driver. But the potential in electric cars is that it could be tuned towards the city. Perhaps different cities or countries will choose sounds that suit their place.” As a next step, Mark McKeague plans to develop real-life prototypes from his simulation. “I would like to create a sound performance using a convoy of electric cars, in order to experience the sound alongside the street ambience.“ Now that would be an original electric roadside orchestra!

Make also sure to watch Mark's latest urban sound project, Make The City Sound Better, which he developed together with London-based sound artist Yuri Suzuki for Danish headphone maker AIAIAI:

MAKE THE CITY SOUND BETTER is the determined name of the campaign for AIAIAIs latest headphone-release, the Capital, which we designed for the on-the-go urbanite. 

© watchAIAIAI