Penang South Islands is a smart, green, low-carbon-emitting “eco-city” built across three reclaimed islands off the coast of Penang in Northwest Peninsular, Malaysia. Or at least it will be. Maybe. For now, it exists only as a plan, one that is already mobilizing capital, agitating environmentalist groups, and animating governmental decisions about the future direction of Malaysia. That doesn’t mean you can’t see Penang South Islands, though, or experience it. Detailed CGI renderings are available on the website of Bjarke Ingels Group, the superstar Danish architectural firm that designed Penang South Islands, as well as across the Internet. What you’ll notice when you see them is a lush, layered landscape, crisscrossed by water features, with buildings that look like ancient Mayan ruins rediscovered in a Silicon Valley tech company campus. In its CGI renderings, Penang South Islands doesn’t just look green, it feels green, simulating the ambient sensibility of an imagined sustainable future.
In this talk, I discuss the affective and imaginative work that CGI renderings engage in, as well as the material landscapes they help shape, structure, and instill with meaning. Having recently returned from Southeast Asia, where I visited several eco-cities in various stages of completion, I will compare my own photographs with those of the renderings of them, as well as share my preliminary observations about how digitally-created images attain a felt presence within physical space.
Brent Luvaas is Professor of Global Studies and a Graduate Faculty Member in Communication, Culture, and Media at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. A cultural and visual anthropologist, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging (Bloomsbury 2016) and DIY Style: Fashion, Music, and Global Digital Cultures (Berg 2012). His book Street Style was the 2019 winner of the Society for Visual Anthropology’s John Collier Jr Award for Still Photography.
Professor of Global Studies and Graduate Faculty Member in Communication, Culture, and Media , Drexel University
A cultural and visual anthropologist, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us