STEEMTOWN (V.2) : A Community Art Experiment in City-Making

STEEMTOWN is an ongoing community art project powered through your comments and ideas. It’s an experimental game of city-making, a digital Madurodam, where my role is the builder and yours is the planner and curator. Each week, 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.

Introducing V.2

Here is the second phase of STEEMTOWN, below…There are some significant developments this week with the arrival of a large new office building, Church, gas station, music pavilion and the early stages of a town center (in progress). A “downtown” is beginning to take shape. To the North-East, a more natural environment takes root.

Each building and landscape element was 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.

How To Play

Every week, a new layer of buildings will be added to the Town. Each new addition to STEEMTOWN will be derived directly from your comments! Post an image, link, poem in the comment section below. Here are a couple of examples...

Posting 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 development! 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. Let’s see where this blue-tinted wild west takes us!

An Exercise in Building Community

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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A huge thank you to the second generation of STEEMTOWN residents:
@digit @jdbry @k3t3r @riosparada @rubenalexander

If you submitted an idea last week, not to worry! Your feedback will be incorporated soon. Stay tuned as the Town continues to grow!

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follow me @voronoi | design collective @hitheryon