Magic realism device: come

We used to look up at the stars and wonder about our place among them; now we only bow our heads and worry about our bodies in the mud, as Interstellar put it. Wutopia Lab was commissioned by TOPYS, in collaboration with Dajiang Robots, to create a magical-realist installation called Arrival on the Starry Sky Plaza of Shanghai MixC using 3D printing. It is also an attempt by Wutopia Lab's urban micro-space revival plan. Starry Sky Plaza is sandwiched between the back of MixC and the north parking garage, with a subway entrance, making it a purely transit space. TOPYS invited Wutopia Lab to create an installation that activates sociability and activates the plaza. Because the subway runs beneath, the ground floor slab can bear only 3.5 kilonewtons per square meter; the installation must therefore be light, weather-resistant, easy to maintain, safe, waterproof, simple to construct, and especially not drilled into the ground for fixing. TOPYS also wanted the social installation to be highly visible while meeting functional needs; the budget was 500,000 RMB. Standing in the center of Starry Sky Plaza, the designer felt disoriented, stripped of all familiar place identity; it could be any city, any moment. This feeling inspired exploration of a future possibility from science fiction: rather than imitating Magritte or Roland Emmerich, the designer decided to insert a clear Platonic solid into the blurry site to redefine it. It must have the maximum volume the budget allows; under Shanghai's uncertain daylight, the designer chose black. The result is a light, giant, black Big Dumb Object. Working with Dajiang Robots, 3D printing achieved an extreme volume of 3 by 3 by 7 meters, weighing only 650 kilograms, compared with 63,000 kilograms for an equal volume of water. But lightness brings instability concerns; Dajiang calculated and added a steel structure, which also serves as the staircase, stabilizing the base to a total weight of two tons, within the 3.15-ton capacity of the nine-square-meter slab. The robot 3D-printed a black ABS BDO, which the designer titled Arrival. The black BDO that arrives on the plaza is a symbolist installation expressing both the divine and the human. Inside the silent black rectangular volume is an abstract karst cave; you must explore and climb, then see a yellow sky pit through which sunlight shines onto your head, and in that moment you may feel disoriented and reflect on your existence within this complex city. At that moment, the black BDO of Arrival becomes a sacred space within the secular city. The black rectangle can also be decomposed, and the hidden yellow is peeled out to shine; the separated blocks loosely define a secular place, and worldly joys drift through this temporary field. The interior draws on the book Underland, while the exterior draws on the Stargate, a tool for briefly escaping reality. It is 3D-printed, seemingly made by humans yet not quite human-made; what matters is that its arrival activates an edge-condition public space.