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Japan’s Skyline is Full of Self-Replicating Architecture

Kyoto-based artist and filmmaker Aujik imagines Japan’s futuristic cities as self-replicating organisms.
All images courtesy the artist

In the Polygon Graffiti  project, Toyko-based artist and filmmaker Aujik has made augmented reality graffiti twist through cities in the most surreal ways. Building on this work, Aujik released a test for an upcoming project titled Spatial clusters, in which architecture defies physics by snaking through the cityscape.

Last week, Aujik dropped the full video, Spatial Bodies, a refined vision of the project. Influenced by the video game Katamari Damacy, Italian Futurism, and Taiwanese architect Lee Guō's thoughts on the multiplicity of architectural clusters, the video shows the cities of Tokyo and Osaka as playgrounds for the twisting and turning of buildings—most of it static, but some of it in motion.

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Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self-replicating organism,” Aujik tells The Creators Project. “Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.”

Aujik has been planning Spatial Bodies  for years. The idea for it struck him originally while on the Yamanote train loop line in Tokyo.

“The urban landscape and diverse architecture appeared like a forest that seemed chaotic yet structured,” he says. “[I] intended to film it in Tokyo, but since it’s now forbidden to use drones there I shot it in Osaka instead—near Osaka castle and by Abeno Harukas, which is Japan's tallest skyscraper.”

The motion-tracking and build process in the software 3D Studio Max (using Vray render) took four months, during which Aujik had to use Google Maps quite a lot to find more accurate textures, proportions, details, and angles of the buildings. Compared to previous videos, he made 50 buildings for Spatial Bodies.

“All of [the structures] are built from scratch,” Aujik explains. “The ones far away in the background are more simple with just textured shapes while most of them are very detailed. Some have around one million polygons [with] windows, doors, stairs, balconies with fences, and so on.”

“I believe it will be possible to have perfectly accurate motion tracking and motion captures devices that can perform these tasks in real time by using GPS and 3D scanning, tracking large scale areas like a whole city by the centimeter,” Aujik muses. “Then it will be easy to embed CGI and then construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct one’s environment, and be able to save it as file and share with others, whether it will be locked or more of an open source.”

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Ultimately, Aujik hopes that Spatial Bodies will serve as a vision of future possibilities of augmented reality.

Watch the full video below:

To see more of Aujik’s work, find more here.

Related:

This Digital Graffiti Is a Trip Through a Twisted City

'Polygon Graffiti' Turns the World into Digital Art

Explore an Invisible Museum in Augmented Reality