Micro-Utopia
In response to London’s pressing housing crisis Micro-Utopia proposes a shared, immersive and interactive version of a home, where space is born from the finely-tuned sensorial interplay between the body and virtual/physical objects connected to the Internet of Things. A chair invites us to stay with it for a moment; we crawl through a demanding fireplace; our hands are washed in a bowl of digital liquid – the highly speculative model of domesticity explores the architectural implication of co-inhabiting a minimal physical infrastructure within infinitely bespoke virtual worlds. Drawing on radical art practice, interiors in historical painting and contemporary product design, Micro-Utopia is the dream of a house that is nothing, but the parameters of our perception are triggered through the metaphorical dimension of the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

Avatars
For this installation, So Kanno + yang02 composed all kinds of differently sized objects, including a telephone, a traffic cone, a plaster figure, a car, and a plant. Cameras, microphones, monitors and microcomputers are embedded in everyday objects arranged in the exhibition space, and connected to the Internet. Visitors can experience the work by logging in to / “riding“ each object via a web browser. Those objects exist as substitutes of – yet together with – real human beings (the visitors) in the same real environment that is subject to physical laws, rather than operating in a virtual space. Against the backdrop of the age of IoT, where all kinds of things are connected through networks, and artificial intelligence is about to mature, this work observes the new relationships that emerge when inorganic, non-autonomous objects transform into persons that act and perceive the world according to their own intentions.