A qUEER VIRTUAL SPACE
A queer virtual space was a design research project driven by ecological concerns, one which I undertook as part of my masters at the University of Lethbridge. The objective behind the research was to create an endless city that wraps unto itself and then propose alternate spaces that imagines its collapse. More documentation of the project can be found here.
The city was made in the game engine Unity and was composed of models created in the modeling software Houdini. The were textured using a mixture of personally shot photographs and open-source textures found on ambientCG and cc0.
In a state of collapse.
I then passed some of the urban and suburban models through fissuring and cracking animations in Houdini, and proposed phases for how these structures would come apart. I used Houdini HDAs to add vines and trees to complete the imagery of a collapsed abandoned urban/suburban space. I added textures in the form of photographed fabrics and other personal memorabilia, and then used these to queer the collapsed buildings, trees and vines.
Day tiME.
The abandoned city with its collapsed structures is now a zone of queer liberation. In a space once occupied by concrete, tar, asphalt and brick, nature in its queerness has taken back control. Structures once divested of flora and fauna have now become zones under control of weeds and fungi, immersed in mud and dirt.
.Night tiME
The queer elements that spawn and appear in spaces of abandonment and collapse are in many ways vibrantly radiant. Their diverse qualities are more vivid in the night, where they glow, flow and shudder along paths of queer movement, radically different from what would otherwise be seen in the urban city.