The short film “Fractal Cities” documents a diverse collection of habitation, ranging from various forms of housing estates to temporary shelters in underground tunnels. These typical cases selected from the wide spectrum of living conditions in Hong Kong are dissected, folded, and morphed into an imaginary landscape. In this fractal city, concepts such as big and small, in and out, are no longer applicable. It challenges the 3-dimensional constraint and envisions a fluid digital world. The 3D scanned fragments of the city are represented as point clouds, faithfully archiving bygone experiences while remaining at a distance from reality aesthetically. In such tension with the physical world, the film proposes a virtual alternative that is not detached from but entangled with reality. The project was supported by Design Trust and the 9th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (Shenzhen).”
Director – Haotian Zhang
Haotian Zhang is a Research Scientist at Apple AI/ML, Visual Intelligence. His research aims to enable embodied agents to understand the outside world. To that end, he works on designing sensible modules that learn the effective representation of information from 2D/3D image data, as well as natural language. His recent work on GLIP&GLIPv2 has been accepted to the CVPR 2022 (Best Paper Finalist), and NeurIPS 2022. He also co-organized the ECCV 2022 workshop on Computer Vision in the Wild. Prior to joining Apple, he obtained his Ph.D. in the Information Processing Lab at University of Washington, advised by Prof. Jenq-Neng Hwang, where he focused on monocular 3D object detection and multi-object tracking. He received his B.S. degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017, supervised by Prof. Jun-Fa Mao. He believes that living an interesting life is done by doing interesting things with interesting people, and that’s what he hopes to do.