Urban Daily Life

Reineke (1979) was born in Holland. In 2002 she graduated at the Design Academy Eindhoven with her research on World Skin Color Maps. Reineke continued to investigate social divisions and urban development in various cities. She worked with trend and brand specialist Pim van den Berg between 2002 and 2006, who introduced her to streetology. Reineke has worked with Pim on a variety of projects ranging from streetologizing 17 cities in France, to a project to discover the visual genetics of a dutch beer brand. Reineke is a member of the Dynamic City Foundation and in 2006 she published her photo book China Daily Life. In 2007 Reineke regained and extended her Skin Color project and exposed it during the Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Shenzhen. In 2008 she worked with OMA on the project: Dubai Next, Face of 21^st Century. Reineke is a teacher at the department Well Being at the Design Academy Eindhoven.In 2009 she launched the website Urban Daily Life which is an compilation of the genetics of cities she gathered in the last years. It shows us the ingredients we can find in a City.

Reineke Otten is both an artist and a social scientist. She is an artist, because her photos capture the strange and inarticulable beauty of everyday life. And a scientist, because her goal is not merely to capture beauty, but also to assemble fragments in a way that demonstrates patterns and orders. Taking a highly structural approach, Reineke's way of working is a research method for a visual sociology. She begins her inquiries from the bottom up, observing the smallest of details and social interactions and, in using these, she suggests how larger-scale institutions operate around them. Her method intensifies a multiplicity of social relations and interactions

Over the course of two years, Reineke took 24,000 images of seven different cities in China. These pictures resulted in the book China Daily Life in which they were structured in a rigid grid, an example of what she calls 'Streetology'.

"By looking at the visual genetic make up of a certain place I am trying to discover a universal language. Every city around the world has many of the same ingredients but how these elements interact tells us about the cities unique character. Using the same method in different cities will eventually show similarities through their differences and differences through their similarities"

Otten's work is filled with an obsession to capture information before we even have time to witness the moment or understand what's going on. Reineke's World Skin Color Project is an example of her ability to transfer raw complex data into a simple and new visual language.