Photographs taken while researching my RCA dissertation, Shanghai 2006 documents a city undergoing accelerated physical, cultural and technological transformation. Old and new, East and West, analogue and digital coexist within an increasingly dense urban system. Architecture, infrastructure, advertising and human movement create an intense visual overabundance.

Influenced by ideas around Marc Augé’s supermodernity and Derrida’s deconstruction, I became interested in reading the city as a metaphor: a system of overlapping signs, structures and contradictions. Networks of cables, repeated windows, illuminated façades and rapidly changing skylines began to dissolve architecture into lines, grids and units of information.

It was within this collision that the pixel began to emerge as a language in my work–a unit through which complexity could be broken down, reorganised and reconstructed. Shanghai became an early point of departure for my continuing investigation into the grid, repetition, systems and information.