Soundscaping

The City Of Abadyl

Abadyl is a proposed city, a fantasy, a set of codes and models, a library of artifacts and prototypes and foremost it is it's co-creators. From the beginning attempts to understand and redefine our world in a situation where information is lacking. This lack of information is used as a resource. By providing ambiguous fragments as a starting point, the scenarios put no constraints on imagination. It has become a large database of material that is interlinked through the architecture of a city, regardless of its incompatibilities. It creates an open-ended way of working with art and design based on scenarios extracted from the framework and rule-set of the city. It has deliberately become a detailed environment for our worldmaking experiments, where we have played around with both real and fictitious assumptions. Using as a narrative structure for this design fictions, we created scenarios, plotting a series of human dilemmas that are applicable in relation to what it means to be human, how to plan and live our lives and to find some purpose in our journey across different contexts and situations, both future and present. We have also at the same time concluded a series of creative methods that can govern shared and inter disciplinary explorations and sometimes the creation of prototypes and artifacts. See Figure 1

Figure 1.

Images from the first exhibition Gallery Skanes Konst 2003

Creating such a world and communicating it with others is not easy. The task both complex and demanding and the risk of being disappointed on what you will achieve is evident. The basic idea was to establish a space where to practice a critique of art, culture, and society, through an investigation of philosophy and criticism in a dynamic material in a mixed reality space. So to be able to establish such an infrastructure we came up with the idea to set up a closed but yet complex space, an area with blurred borders to the surrounded unknown. So to support this we looked for metaphors that could host this delimited space. The analogy to racing tracks was obvious; with roads that just looped themselves through their environment; Together with five architect students, I had to find, write and draw a set of characteristics for every part of the city. See Figure 2 A sort of simplified framework or pattern language Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa (1977) had to be developed. It was set up as follows:

Figure 2.

The city of Abadyl framework