The Nomad, The Technologist (2013)

The Nomad, The Technologist

2013

Exhibited at Design Intelligence: Advanced Computational Research, in 751-D, Beijing, China 2013, curated by Neil Leach and Xu Weiguo

The Nomad, The Technologist is a proposal for a system of seasonal camps and airfields for herders and miners across the Gobi Desert, and a cautionary design fiction that deconstructs neoliberal and technocratic fantasies. Through the medium of film, fiction and a combination of speculative and archival imagery, The Nomad, The Technologist projects into the future via Mongolia’s past as a post-Soviet state and site of Central Asian empire.

The design narrative centers around a geographical scale Soviet style planner who uses automated means for economic and urban growth in Mongolia. He implements a series of large scale, territorial planning measures and site design strategies ranging from infrastructural intervention to "smart camps" that use sensors. Simulation models of camp settlement using a Markov chain were used to generate urban plans, and a digital elevation model as the underlying matrix was used to determine probabilities of settlement.

Contemporary constructions of territory today are made through landscapes of data. The Nomad, The Technologist leverages the cybernetic systems of remote sensing, real time data and modeling to reverse engineer a set of algorithms that construct a flexible, nomadic urban framework; equations that allow for variable ecological inputs to create structure and layouts for 133 nomadic free trade zones in Mongolia. It deploys the automation and computation of projected nomadic pastoralist movement through geographical data in GIS and Processing, alongside a physical model with real time sensor data to generate seasonal formations of the 133 sites. In understanding that datascapes shape site and geography, this project uses computation at geographical and regional scales to design process and form.

This project has detailed renderings + diagrams. Selections of images are available below or download the full pdf spreads of all drawings with video narrative here: https://xrwang.github.io/clips/Print_Panels_XW.pdf

Masters Thesis Advisor:
Pierre Bélanger