morphoPoly. A (...) design game for morphing city models

"morphoPoly" is a project on the building, transforming, documenting and dissolving of model cities in several media, online and in real space. Ecology, urban history, city films and story telling are involved. We investigate systems of entangled life styles to create playful tools for a structured building process involving cooperation, competition and evaluation with and by several groups and specialists. During the first stage, we will develop an "urban vocabulary" in an inter-disciplinary process with experts from various fields. A multi-media archive will be generated, using public domain resources and the analogue and digital archives of the "Austrian Filmmuseum". We ask how the growth and de-growth of cities, both real and ideal, can be understood in analogy to organic growth and geological processes. Is the city as a dynamic system involving various species a hybrid organism? If each city is defined by its history and mythology, by its "air", its "vibe", how can we represent this specific life form with various materials? The first version will be built by several teams of children under adult supervision. Teams will act as "colour clans" and build "morphoPoly" in a slightly competitive game where each clan is responsible for a particular aspect. Later stages of each model city will involve the intervention of cross-species agencies, the passengers, whose ecstatic and highly transient life style makes them perfect testers for the life quality of the city. In accordance to the fast and efficient metabolism of the passengers who never leave any waste behind, we apply the principle of "trophic cascades" (efficient resource management) to city models that are built, documented and destroyed in order to feed their traces and memories into the next stage of dreaming, telling, learning and building. Thus, the destruction of each city model in the physical space is part of the creative process, The building process is also throughout a process of evaluation, critique, story-telling and testing to provide for a collective, didactic experiment for the preparation of an age of participatory architecture and city planning. We are training our organs of dreaming up cities, new and ancient, and testing those dreams with various hybrid materials. The core team consists of KT Zakravsky, trained philosopher and artist with a background in performance, science fiction studies and the curating of complex projects involving storytelling, performance and installation in Seestadt, Aspern. Simone Carneiro is artistic director, fine artist and media professional specialized in video and digital design. She also designs professional media environments at UNIDO. The team is completed by inter-disciplinary professionals: Andreas Donhauser (specialist for stage design and location in film); Kristoffer Stefan (kinetic architect/designer), Jan Lauth (curator of a city lab in Seestadt Aspern), Walter Roschnik (fine artist with a background in architecture and design).

"morphoPoly" was an artistic research project in which groups of children, artists, students and others built city models out of mixed materials, which were constantly changed and then dismantled. These models were documented through photos, videos, 3D scans and audios in order to analyze them. The next stages of the research project were developed from these evaluations and analyses. The children and other participants were understood both as users of the city and as creative urban planners. We asked less about a dream city and more about the concrete, multi-sensory experience of the city. How do we feel about constructed spaces, transportation systems, energy production, green and recreational spaces? Life in the city is currently undergoing a profound transformation from the classic western metropolis (Paris, London, New York) to complex urban models of the 21st century. Children between the ages of 6 and 12 were encouraged to actively engage in the cities they reside in, embracing the principles of "citizen science" and participatory urban design. The main topics were the ecological transformation of spatial planning and transportation and the city as a habitat for diverse, not just human, life forms. This process-oriented research took two distinct forms over the course of two years: On the one hand, informally complex city models were designed that had to deal with environmental conditions such as extreme weather, drought, pollution and earthquakes, a task supported by ecologically extended "story telling". On the other hand, an extended "board game" was designed, which in several variants initiated a transformation of urban planning, in which, for example, a hyper-dense, car traffic-oriented city was systematically dismantled in order to design a still empty urban development area. This game design reached a climax in the form of a multi-part game on six tables, which were originally designed for a computer club. Those tables had wheels and could form a large ring. This setup made it possible to transform the individual urban planning process into a cooperative design of a larger urban landscape, which also involved planning and financing transportation systems and energy networks together. Apart from the building sessions, we also organized excursions into real urban spaces to inspire a specific design process; and we organized several workshops on animation to tell cinematic stories with the use of lego and other materials. Those stories evolved around sea and other monsters that could serve as concrete metaphors of climate change.