This weeks friday feature we are very proud to introduce a guest post by Matthew Shaw. Matthew graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2009 and his stunning project "Subverting the Lidar Landscape", has already been featured in two exhibitions and a book. We've managed to catch up with Matthew and ask him to give us a short insight into his work.

Subverting the LiDAR Landscape is a speculative project which questions the way we interact with digital and physical versions of our cities.  The project is based around LiDAR technology - 3D scanning but on a city scale.  Google Earth and Streetview are peoples preferred method of urban spatial research and are taken as virtual fact by a global internet population.  They will soon be replaced by intricate 3D modeled versions of our cities derived from mobile 3D scanning units – LiDAR equipped vehicles. 

The project aims to subvert this mapping.  It arms the population with the tools to edit the way their city is scanned and recorded.  These tools are not digital hacks but physical interventions.  They manipulate the scanning process and act as waypoints and markers linking the physical world to the digital.

Surveillance Series:

This series of drawings explores the city from stealth locations.  They show what a LiDAR unit sees, they represent what a radar can sense if it could look through walls and speculate on what an IRA bomber may have thought, or what AL-Qaida may be watching.  Simultaneously they hide, see through walls, bend light and look round corners.

Scan Series:

These landscapes are hybrids of real and imagined LiDAR data.  They take actual 3D scans of the parliament area of London and breed them with speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains.  These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them.  They show the route of stealth drills carving LiDAR data in the public redecoration zone.  They show boundary miscommunication devices – hotspots of spatial truths and mistruths.  They show the deployment of flash architecture and toolpaths of stealth mechanics.  Parliament is offset to St. James Park; protesters shelter under a LiDAR shield on the Mall, an urban transplant replaces Downing Street with an insurgent gateway and a Huas-MattaClarkian vista.

Prototype Series:

A series of prototypical objects explore the form and materiality of stealth and subversion.  Each object starts life as an intuitively carved wooden sketch.  These then became 3D notebooks on which to design precise insertions and additions.  The objects are then 3D scanned using a self built scanner to enable precision inserts to be machined and added to the originals.  These objects are then scanned and their digital siblings cast and machined from the scanned data.

Matthews project may be found in the recently published 'Passages Through Digital Hinterlands' by Ruairi Glynn and Sara Shafiei, which features graduate work from across London's top architectural Schools- Santas please take note!