2023 Creative Capital Award

rootoftwo awarded for Anyspace? Whatever.

We are honored to have been awarded a 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Award. The award is to “…fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined.“

Our project, ‘Anyspace? Whatever.‘ (AW) is conceived as a temporary architectural-scale indoor/outdoor installation designed to function as a provocation, emblem, and host site for a series of reciprocal exchanges, research, community-led technology workshops, and people’s assemblies to support the ground-up visioning work of creating an equitable/responsible “smart city.” Deep equity and justice implications are bound up with the excitement and possibilities that technology affords. AW takes as its starting point Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of “any-space-whatever”—the propositional spaces visualized in glossy architectural renderings and discussed in corporate and policy literature about the “smart” city. By reasserting inflections that express curiosity, dismay, and ambivalence with the role of technology in shaping the social and the civic, the public and the private, AW is designed to instigate creative actions and activism. Our goal for the project is to initiate public debate and open speculation on how we might develop equitable and accountable technology/platforms while also imagining structures for resistance and agency. Materially, the project proposes methods for designing/building architecture, ephemera, and objects that incorporate strategies for surfacing and, in some cases, evading electronic, sonic, and visual means of detection. The material qualities of the structures/objects are defensive postures against the smart city: a kind of architectural security blanket. We are particularly interested in researching low-observable technologies, electrochromic materials, and dazzle camouflage/painting (from World War I to contemporary uses in the automotive industry). Equally, we imagine using extended reality/augmented reality to create ephemera and media surrounding the installation.

Our project supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities.