Virtual People’s Network

In an ideal world, ceteris paribus, the key determinant to an egalitarian existence would be one’s access to information. The Internet is a global platform of information exchange, increasingly set to supercede conventional experiences of space-time. Spatially, the virtual world provides a dictionary of syntactic frameworks that can inspire redefinitions of the physical world. The Internet age has also brought about a chronological revolution that has amalgamated the future, present, and past into a continuous spectrum of simultaneous time perception. // In pursuit of Evolution, Involution and Resolution, the Virtual People’s Network (VPN), is a systematic compression of space-time in order to minimize spatial and temporal distances to reduce transit time between events, while at the same time maximising simultaneous intake of information. This is done through reimagining Beijing as a city experienced through “augmented reality”, which is a symbiotic superimposition of the virtual onto the physical world, creating a new way of seeing and living that will enable the city and its people to construct collective and individual realities. // The social hierarchy in Beijing both determines and is determinant upon one’s access to geographical information. It results in a vicious cycle that continues to widen the gap between the poor and the privileged. Beijing’s current social structure favors old city dwellers and ostracizes new migrant workers. Our vision of Beijing dissolves this social hierarchy by collapsing the conventional space-time continuum and offering equal access to information The participants of the new Beijing will inevitably be engaged in the production of reality, one that is more egalitarian and results in the redistribution of knowledge. Beijing, both real and virtual will serve the people. // Urbanization has always been a product of man and machine, because the formation of cities reflects, at a macro-scale, the interrelationship between humans and technology. Despite this collaboration, inevitable tensions arise, because unlike the endlessly experimental and speculative machine, mankind is subjected to corporeal needs and physical constraints. // The VPN is then no longer a dialogue between man and machine, but the rise of the man-machine hybrid. In the nascent evolution of this new species, a crucial component that safeguards against possible extinction is a constant vacillation between the individual and the collective, as well as the virtual and the physical, so that one does not stagnate within individual virtual fantasies of the world. We call this vacillation a “heartbeat”, a metaphorical transfusion of oxygen into the lifelines of our existence; a constant movement that acts as a direct defence mechanism against the dead and the still. //