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New York Biotopes: Watch the City Come Alive, Trip Out


January 31, 2013 | Marina Galperina

It starts off familiar enough. Times Square. Faded REVS tags. The High Line… and then, traffic lights begin to bloom in clusters, subway turnstile bars unfurl and wave like seagrass, street lights blossom into dandelion shapes.

This New York Biotopes animation by German student Lena Steinkühler is going to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Watch as everything industrial and metropolitan becomes organic, breathing, undulating — a hallucinatory hybrid. And then the metaphor gets a little lost because there are giant neon jelly fish floating through Grand Central, but still. Nice. Very nice. Ow, my head.

My idea was to create a film, that fills up the metropolis New York with vegetation, that adapts to the straightness of the technology and the given situation. This happens through the assimilation of structures and forms. These biotopes are shaped by the existing living environment, but in turn also shape the newly developed living environment by their presence. In other words, a symbiotically coexistence begins.