STEEMTOWN [Reboot] : A Collaborative Art Experiment in City-Making

Rebuilding Block by Block!

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It's been a very long time, but I'm super excited to announce the reboot of "STEEMTOWN"! This time, we'll be building it a little bit differently... more on that in the next post :D For right now, here's a culmination of past work within STEEMTOWN and how it will evolve in the next iteration...

STEEMTOWN is an community art project powered through your comments and ideas. It’s an experimental game of city-making, a digital Madurodam. With each post, a new layer of buildings will be added to the Town. Your photographs, quotes, stories and feedback are the raw materials that drive construction for each new layer. For more, here is a link to the introductory post of STEEMTOWN and the project mission.

Buildings Created through Comments

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Each building and landscape element is inspired by a family of comments (outlined below.) These photographs, quotes and stories inspired their own design logic and manifested themselves as 3D characters within the Town.

For all the buildings you see rendered, I used a 3D modeling software called Rhinoceros to create each geometry from scratch. Afterwards, the model was rendered and edited in Abobe Illustrator to bring out the intricacies of linework and geometry.

How to Participate (soon!)

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Beginning next week, new "blocks" of buildings will be added to the Town with every post. Each new addition to STEEMTOWN will be derived directly from your engagement, below. (Comments, ideas, contributions etc.)

Commenting with an image or a story isn’t the only way to play! Your critique is also important... With each post, Steemit commenters can contribute ideas for future growth, renovation, or even petition for a deconstruction. (Maybe more on that down the road.) For now, there’s a lot of room for future growth. As the Town matures we will be making / polling community decisions on zoning, infrastructure, preservation, public and private uses. STEEMTOWN will be treated as a living, breathing art-project within a digital canvas, always subject to change.

For the soon-to-arrive 2.0 phase of the Town, I'll be opening up the canvas for other 3D artists to play with. Right now, I'm building out a toolkit for other 3D modelers to download / create their own building to add in! Perhaps this could be an art project built into @utopian-io? Stay tuned as more develops...

An Exercise in Building Community

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Through this project - I hope to engage in a broader dialogue with fellow Steemians about their own sense of place and placemaking. These types of game-structured conversations are a fascinating way of learning more about what a person defines as his or her “community.” It’s a way of us connecting to one another through the geographies we are deeply tied to and knowledgeable of. In a world of links, likes, upvotes and IP addresses, it’s exciting to find ways of bridging the digital divide and connecting with those on the other side of the screen.

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Stay tuned as the Town continues to grow!

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