Updates
Ongoing Work
Updates: Excerpts from ongoing work
Top Image: From a recent image essay titled Simultaneous REBUILDING/RECONSTRUCTION. The essay includes remixed images of Ground Zero in New York under construction with found images of new embassy buildings and military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. On site photos and online images collated through search engines are recombined to produce collages with inverted and forced symmetries. The reformatted images depict two contrasting and linked sides "nation-building" in action. Go to Essay
Bottom Image: A sketch for Triptych series of prints. Excerpted from Triptych-Apps, a project in progress about multilingual interface and play. See more information below.
Two Cities / Three Futures
Architectural Transcripts (Forthcoming)
Two Cities / Three Futures: Architectural Transcripts (Forthcoming)
Two Cities / Three Futures is an audio-visual web documentary that revisits two urban sites: Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST Station) in Mumbai and Ground Zero in New York. The project combines archival and contemporary newsreels, films, videos with arhcitectural images and drawings in a multilayered montage that simultaneously explore what connects these cities and keeps them apart. An expansive view of these two cities unfolds with an innovative interface of a single multimedia "drawing" with embedded sound and film clips. Using archival materials and speculative drawings the project reconstructs local, distinct and interconnected futures while examining issues of memory and memorials; architectures of war and nation building; world cities and world heritage; advertising and activism; among others. The project is currently in progress and excerpts will be featured on this website.
Triptych-Apps
Multi-Lingual Interface + Play (in progress)
Triptych-Apps:
Image 1: Triptych: Tri-Alpha (iPad/iPhone App)
Video 1: Triptych: Touch Scribe (Interactive Projection)
Video 2: Triptych: Reorder A-B-C (Animation)
Website: www.triptych-apps.com
Triptych: Tri-Alpha (iPad/iPhone App): Download
TRIPTYCH-Apps is a series of new media projects based on multilingual alphabets. Three languages are juxtaposed in electronic interfaces inviting viewers to visually and audibly compare alphabets, their unique ordering systems, and their distinct lingual scripts. The projects lead users to playfully encounter alphabets and review differences and commonality among three languages. They allow transliteral comparisons by simultaneous views and sounds of multiple character sets and selected words. The projects use new technologies for relearning the basics with engaging electronic interfaces and unique cognitive and tactile interactions using iPhone apps, projections and interactive installations. The inspiration is to building a kind of multilingual intelligence that prepares us for a diverse world where we may cherish seeing words that may look different and sound foreign.
Project collaborators: Kadambari Baxi, Mark Collins, Sofia Krimizi, Marcos Garcia Rojo
Citizenship by Design
Design Research Exhibition
Citizenship by Design and Uncounted Counts
Images: Public installation and exhibition views
e-Publication: Citizenship By Design
Citizenship by Design investigates the design of international passports, identification technologies, and travel regulations to raise critical questions about contemporary citizenship, security and nation-branding. By highlighting the aesthetics of these bureaucratic documents and procedures, and by remixing graphic elements into multinational hybrids, the projects calls attention to the ways that citizenship is designed and the ways it might be reimagined in an era of proliferating global crossings.
This project began with a competitive grant from the International Design Foundation in Ulm, Germany. It resulted in: a public booth installation in Columbus Park, Chinatown, where neighborhood residents contributed views on citizenship through bi-lingual ballots and discussions; an exhibition at the Van Alen Institute in New York, titled as "Aesthetics of Crossing," and paired with an exhibit on US border stations (by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects); an appearance at the Tunnel Gallery on the Barnard campus where students gave responses on graphically provocative ballots; a workshop at the Design and Culture program at the University of Arts in Zurich where multilingual discussions debated citizenship in the context of the European Union.
Project collaborators: Kadambari Baxi, Irene Cheng
Formica Faux Real
Exhibition
Formica Faux Real
Image: Future Natural product design
Formica Faux/Real was produced as an installation for Disonancias, an arts organization in Spain promoting collaborations between artists and regional industries. The installation consisted of drawings and a video that used re-appropriated advertising images from the Formica archive, with humor and fantasy, to locate future products within three somewhat ironic scenarios: Future Natural, Future Individual and Future Illusion.
Project collaborators: Kadambari Baxi, Maureen Connor
Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries
Book, Exhibition
Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries
Book (Co-Authors: Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Publisher: Actar, 2007). Order Online: Actar, Amazon
Multi-National City follows three architectural itineraries through three cities and their histories. Like so many, these cities are caught within the feedback loops of globalization: Silicon Valley in northern California; New York's internal suburbias; and Gurgaon, a burgeoning corporate city outside of New Delhi. Each exhibits a distinct character, while together, they also form important nodes in what the authors describe as a single Multi-National City (MNC) stretching across the globe. The itineraries traced through them take the reader on a tour of the architectural monuments of corporate globalization: corporate campuses, high-rise towers, public atriums, call centers, and gated communities that tracks their shared logic, their internal discrepancies, and their undeniable strangeness. Each itinerary concludes with an unannounced stop at an architectural project that applies the lessons of the Multi-National City to itself.
Entropia
Book, Exhibition
Entropia
Video 1: Entropia: Homeoffice
Video 2: Entropia: Openhouse
Video 3: Entropia: Embassy
Image 4: Entropia: Book (Publisher: Black Dog Publishing, 2001) documenting architectural works by Kadambari Baxi and Reinhold Martin. Videos excerpts above. Book: Order online: Black Dog Publishing, Amazon
Suspended between utopia and dystopia, Entropia reformats and combines buildings, images, advertisements, films, and news footage excerpted from the 1960s and early 1970s to produce a multimedia world in which past and future collapse into an indeterminate present. A 1960s office tower, a suburban house, and a former US embassy are recycled to produce an enigmatic architecture drifting through the landscapes of the information age.
Entropia circulates as a book, digital videos and interactive screens.
Martin / Baxi Architects
Website
Martin / Baxi Architects
Image: Link to Flash website
Martin / Baxi Architects is a collaboration formed around the diverse expertise of the two partners: Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi. Both are architects, but both are something else: one a theorist/historian and the other a new media designer/artist. This flash website features excerpts of their architectural work. The website is designed with a unique navigation system that expands or disappears, similar to a viewing gadget that may be pulled out of your pocket. In addition, this navigation system also functions as an efficient site-map, where you can preview the entire site without any mouse clicks. See Website.
Multimedia Design
Work for Nonprofits
Multimedia Design for Nonprofits
Image: Website design prototypes for The Hauser Center at Harvard University.
We are committed to design research and innovative media projects that address social and cultural issues. We have significant experience in working for nonprofits and cultural institutions in the past. Our previous projects include collaborations with a range of organizations including The Hauser Center, Vera Institute of Justice, The Architectural League, Public/Private Ventures, Center for Court Innovation, and others. We form collaborations around our architecture and media design expertise and visionary ideas. For more information contact: info@imagemachine.com
About + Credits
IMAGEMACHINE Collabarative
IMAGEMACHINE
IMAGEMACHINE is a collaborative practice that incorporates expanded architecture and media concepts in multidisciplinary projects. The practice is based in New York and is led by Kadambari Baxi.
Kadambari Baxi is an architect, media designer and educator. (Partner: Martin/Baxi Architects, Principal: Imagemachine and Professor: Barnard College of Columbia University: Department of Architecture).
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: info@imagemachine.com
WEBSITE CREDITS: Consultant: Xiao Qin
