TOKYO.- Prada presents “Sturm&Drang Preview Services”, an exhibition project organized with the support of Fondazione Prada, at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 22 July to 26 November 2021. The fifth floor of the iconic building designed by Herzog & de Meuron hosts a new development direction of the project “Sturm&Drang”, a collaboration between Fondazione Prada and gta exhibitions, ETH Zürich.

Curated by Luigi Alberto Cippini (Armature Globale), Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen (gta exhibitions, ETH Zürich), “Sturm&Drang” explores Computergenerated imagery (CGI) practices, experiences, and environments. The exhibition aims at highlighting the complexity of computer modeling and investigating contemporary image production and its impact on our daily perception.

“Sturm&Drang Preview Services” looks directly at the preliminary nondigital processes in use in CGI, presenting through material technologies a set of environments —critically re-constructed by architecture and urbanism studio Armature Globale— that are part of the analysis of the overall project. Rather than focusing on the final products, the digital images, “Sturm&Drang Preview Services” is an aggregate of environments and sets that witness real or imaginary spaces in which CGI is invented, tested and produced.

This project acts as a repository of physical content and its raw engagement with digital technologies, through a selection of partitions and environments. These include a room freely inspired by Cheap Hotel in Chiba, the fictional environment described in William Gibson’s iconic science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), from which the protagonist connects to cyberspace.

The exhibition revolves around how Styrofoam mockups, DIY (do-ityourself) motion studies and museum podiums can challenge questions of live representation when extracted from contemporary means of image making and engineering, such as 3D computer assisted drawing, liverendering and post-production.

“Sturm&Drang Preview Services” provides a critical grounding for understanding environments and social constructs in software technology houses and creative offices by showcasing raw cut materials against advanced resolution images. The challenge of this project also applies to the format of authorship and subjectivity, presenting mock-ups and architecture’s modules resulting from the collaboration with the ETH students and researchers.

The first phase of the two-year program “Sturm&Drang” took the form of the online university course “Sturm&Drang Studio” addressed to students at ETH Zürich Department of Architecture and held from February to June 2021. The course has produced a currently ongoing series of digital conversations available on the Fondazione Prada website. “Sturm&Drang Preview Services” anticipates some of the themes that will be further expanded in an exhibition to be presented at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan, from 9 September 2021 to 22 January 2022.