Project 3 YOU, ME, AND THE CITY THAT HOLDS US
My work explores the city as a field of relationships, an ever-shifting network of roads, infrastructures, bodies, ecologies, and systems that continuously shape one another. Cities are often understood through their architecture or skylines, yet what fascinates me is the invisible web beneath them. Major roads branch into smaller streets like veins across a body. Transit lines, utilities, data flows, and human movement overlap into a dense choreography of dependence and exchange. Nothing exists independently. Every path, structure, and decision is tied to countless other forces unfolding simultaneously.
Through projection mapping, I layered roads, topographies, and infrastructural networks onto speculative urban forms to reveal the hidden relationships embedded within the built environment. I am interested in how cities hold contradiction. They connect and isolate. They create intimacy through density while also producing anonymity. Within the scale of the contemporary city, the individual often feels impossibly small. Towers rise beyond comprehension. Networks stretch farther than we can perceive. We move through systems we did not design and rarely fully understand. Yet there is something profoundly human in that smallness. To feel small within the city is also to feel connected to something larger than oneself, to become part of a collective rhythm of movement, labor, memory, and survival. We are urbanism as much as we inhabit it.
My work critiques the illusion that infrastructure is neutral or purely functional. Roads, transit systems, and networks are social instruments that shape who belongs, who moves freely, and who is pushed to the margins. A highway cutting through a neighborhood becomes an act of separation. A transit gap becomes an absence of opportunity. Networks distribute not only movement, but also power, visibility, and access. The city is never fixed. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing desires, between efficiency and care, expansion and preservation, individuality and collectivity.
The projected layers in my work flicker like unstable memories or living organisms, exposing the city as unfinished and unresolved. I do not see utopia as a perfected condition free from conflict. Instead, I see it as the capacity to continuously renegotiate our relationships to one another, to infrastructure, and to the landscapes we occupy. My work asks how cities might become more conscious of the systems they produce and more attentive to the fragile human connections that exist within them.