Exquisite City (2015)¶
Exquisite City from Scatter on Vimeo.
Description¶
Urban spaces are in a constant state of flux. While cities are barraged by the forces of degradation, gentrification and renewal – our experience of urban environments are similarly ever-shifting. The city’s practical form lies between the arrangement of the buildings and the imaginations of its inhabitants.
Inspired by the surrealist parlor game exquisite corpse, Exquisite City is a collaborative 3D drawing of one such imaginary neighborhood. Our city is built of cubic tiles, such as an ornate street corner, a window with drooping shutters, or a patch of cobblestones – each a 3D scanned element derived from photographs collected during the Exquisite City Workshop.
The result is a videogame, a surreal walking tour of the area around Belgrade’s Republic Square.
The track is called Western City Gate from Infinite Particles off The Great Common Task.
References¶
Exquisite City¶
Urban spaces are in a constant state of flux. Cities are barraged by the forces of degradation, gentrification and renewal. Our experience of urban environments are similarly ever-shifting. The city’s practical form lies somewhere between the arrangement of the buildings and the imagination of its inhabitants.
A Collaborative 3D Drawing¶
Inspired by the surrealist parlor game exquisite corpse, Exquisite City is a collaborative 3D drawing constructed during a workshop in Belgrade, Serbia. Students ventured into the city to 3D capture the architecture. We then collaboratively reconstruct a virtual city of cubic tiles – an ornate street corner, a window with drooping shutters, a patch of cobblestones – each one a 3D scanned contribution from a participant collected during the workshop.
Credits¶
The Exquisite City workshop was graciously hosted at Resonate Festival 2015 in Belgrade, Serbia. It was produced by James George and Alexander Porter at Scatter.
V: What was the idea behind the workshop?
A: We were inspired by the surrealist drawing exercise of the Exquisite Corpse, where a group of people collectively draw a human figure without seeing the contributions of their collaborators. The exercise results in surreal images of disjointed and fantastical beings. We wanted to expand that exercise to the scale of a city. The Exquisite Corpse concept combined with the research I’ve been doing into photogrammetry scanning resulted in the idea for the workshop as a collaborative project to scan, segment and remix the architecture of the neighborhood surrounding our workshop in downtown Belgrade.