Villa Futuro is a media artistic research and an ongoing Ph.D. project at Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg about urban marginality, art, media, and speculative storytelling.
The project emphasizes an ontological approach to the artistic process from which theoretical, artistical, political, and technological issues are entangled in the story of a marginal city of the future called Villa Futuro. This approach aims to critically unfold a media art practice that engages with modeling discarded materials spaces conveyed as assemblages of disruption. At the same time, the artistic practice contrasts these materials and narratives with the use of new media (such as photometry, augmented reality, and 3D-web-based environments) as an artistic research methodology that enables critical thought, multiperspectivism, and creative forms of speculative storytelling in audiovisual media.
The artistic process started its artistic production with the recollection and dismantling of electronic scrap. The process of reassembling the inner life of the various electronic scrap parts (shown in part in the exhibition “0.5 V 0.2 mA (and Other Entangled Stories)”) forms a basis for multi-perspectival storytelling. Through augmented reality, 3D modeling, and audiovisual techniques, the fictive stories of the inhabitants of Villa Futuro are told non-linearly in interaction with the city model. From here, the recollection of electronic scrap continues with the expansion of Villa Futuro as a digital model on the web. The 3d scan fragments of each discarded electronic device follow the speculative stories of the physical model.
This process and its thematic subjects are explored in the dissertation that accompanies the work.