3x4: Exploring metaspace platforms for inclusive future cities

UCL IEDE's Dr Claire McAndrew contributed to the interactive telepresent installation, 3x4. During Unbox Festival, held between the 12th and 14th December 2014, public audiences in Delhi and London experienced a shared living space. Two identical installations measuring 3x4 metres were draped in blue and green chroma-key fabric to create a mixed-reality live video connection, allowing audiences in London and Delhi to coexist in the same 3x4 metre room on a TV screen in front of them.

In megacities such as Delhi and Mumbai - and within one of the fastest growing cities within the world, Ahmedabad - more than 50% of the population live in informal urban settlements. 3x4 metres is the plot size seen to be provided in resettlement colonies, a government initiative which relocates people within informal inner-city settlements to vacant land on the periphery. Dr Claire McAndrew collaborated with Professor Paul Sermon at the University of Brighton, Swati Janu a Delhi-based Architect and photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam from Bangalore, to look at informal settlements in a different way, where informality is not viewed as a problem, but a promising new model of urbanism for the global south. 3x4 used an immersive telematic networked environment to provide a playful, sensory exploration of new hybrids of digital space. Merging two 3x4 metre room installations in Delhi and London through mixed-reality, this transnational dialogue intended to set an aspiration for developing metaspace platforms in megacities of the global south. It built upon practice-based research conducted as UnBox LABS 2014 Fellows in Ahmedabad, India; which used an immersive installation to explore the qualities and values built through self-organised communities that are lost in the resettlement process.