Exquisite City | Documentary Art Game

Urban spaces are in a constant state of flux. While cities are barraged by the forces of development, degradation, gentrification, and renewal our lived experiences are similarly ever-shifting. The city’s practical form lies somewhere between the arrangement of buildings and the imagination of its inhabitants.

Inspired by the exquisite corpse, a collaborative surrealist parlor game, Exquisite City is a 3D construction of one such imaginary neighborhood. Our city is built of cubic tiles – an ornate street corner, a window with drooping shutters, an isolated patch of cobblestones – each a 3D scanned object derived from photographs collected during the Exquisite City Workshop. The result is part videogame, part collage — a surreal walking tour of the area around Belgrade’s Republic Square.

This project used photogrammetry in a collaborative setting. It was created in a workshop at the Resonate Festival in Serbia by a group of visiting and local artists. Each participant created a set of cubic 'tiles' from the surrounding city. The group then used the collective palette of tiles to reconstruct a block on a map of the historic Republic Square. The resulting piece includes field recordings from the same area.