Virality + Impermanence
Maggie Lee
Opening: June 21, 2019. 8:29 p.m.
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This film seeks to address the way in which we experience architecture, the built environment, and the world in our current age of virality. Media, whether good, bad, cute or funny, goes viral and rains down on us at every second — and we let it. Every droplet is another pixel of millennial pink, corgis, memes or political and social upheaval. We consume these virtual realities just as much as we exist and move through our physical realities. The video calls into question (“capital-A”) Architecture’s ambivalent views of consumer opinion and image culture. The video acts as an omniscient livestream of a hypothetical cause-and-effect cycle where our virtual worlds directly affect our physical worlds. Although it’s not so hypothetical anymore, is it? Our virtual words, text messages, and clickbait headlines begin to warp our experience of the “real world” — and that isn’t necessarily so bad. However, it is increasingly important to be able to wade through this flood of information and arrive at one’s own opinions and conclusions. It is advised that the viewer should read between the lines of the articles, advertisements, and memes to pick up any details that may have been passed over (in life and in the video).
Maggie Lee is a designer, thinker, and human currently based in Boston. However, with much to learn every day, she also sees herself as a perpetual student. Her explorations focus on the interaction between physical and virtual realities—and how they interface with our perceptions of architecture and the world at large. She recently graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California and has aspirations of continuing her research and education in graduate school and beyond. She hopes to one day found her own practice whilst teaching and encouraging fellow architecture students to always question the curiosities of this world. Also, she is a Pisces.