Discovery: A story about rooftops, airships, robots, and inflatables is an installation recently exhibited at SCI-Arc, by architect, educator, and game designer Damjan Jovanovic in partnership with designer and digital artist Lidija Kljakovic, both co-founder of the LA-based game design studio, Lifeforms.io.

Discovery explores themes of worldmaking, ecology and artificial intelligence which is born from observations of an emerging rooftop culture of urban gardening and alternative lifestyles in downtown LA during the pandemic.

The installation features projections, large-scale inflatables like the blimp (which also serves as a bridge between the digital and physical worlds) and a video game. It has a unique design, with the studio’s impeccable aesthetic inspired conceptually by the great utopian architectural proposals of the 1960s – the work of Superstudio, Archizoom, Haus Rucker Co, and Archigram. On the other hand, visually, the installation feeds from Japanese video games and animation, European graphic novels and the story of the radical environmental hacker collective The Airborne Collective.

Each metaphorical layer of this avant-garde installation is meticulously created to digitally and physically immerse the audience and provoke them to question utopian politics, challenging the standard exhibition logic. In Discovery, Lifeforms.io approaches architectural worldmaking through video games and artificial intelligence, imagining a hopeful and regenerative environment in the near future.

The story of the installation follows an entourage of human and non-human characters, The Airborne Collective, as they build inflatable structures, fly airships, make gardens and generally go about their daily lives on the rooftops of downtown LA, bringing back the sense of community and strength that people can have when they work together on the same goals.

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