Daniele Lisi, Cluster
CLUSTER | New Jersey Counties is a project conducted in the spring of 2012 in an urban area situated between the New Jersey countryside and New York City. The area, known as Meadowlands, was part of a 1920s land reclamation project for the development of low-density residential neighbourhoods.
The project, which is divided into two sections, is an “alternative study” of the local urban environment and uses satellite images taken from the Internet.
In the first section the images suggest things ‘other’ than the landscape, ‘other’ than the place itself and the represented objects, and penetrate with methodical objectivity the perceptive filter of an observer alienated from the context of the postmodern city.
The second section is a study of those same places but portrayed during the night-time as “Lived Spaces”.
CLUSTER emphasizes the apparent “beauty” of places whose geometrical and spatial perfection, determined by socio-cultural parameters, is reminiscent of the identity of the virtual cities created in videogames such as “Sim City 3000” or “The Sims”.