CPS - Week 4 - Discussions of Place

CONTEXT

Max’s lecture mentioned a couple of different things that got me thinking about places, and space, as a sort of “volumetric container” for humans. The first was his reference to the development of ‘Breath of the Wild’ and how very simple geometry had been used to create the world, focussing on pyramids and large forms to build a landscape that would entice a player to explore.

The second thing was a casual comment about Pokemon Go, and how the streets were saturated with people all over the world when it was at it’s height of popularity. It reminded me of an interaction I had with the game, when I was heading to a concert at the Sydney Opera House, an touristic hotspot usually surrounded by people taking photos of it and the harbour. Well the Opera House was still surrounded by swarms of people, but this time they were all looking down, ignoring the features of the landscape around them, but still flooding the steps and walkways of the area.

METHOD

I wanted to explore areas which people usually interacted with socially or culturally, and strip them back in Unity, rebuilding them as simply geometric volumes.

RESPONSE

Unity took a while to get used to, seeing as I had never fired it up before, but I eventually managed to reconstruct a cafe using simple white cubes. What I found while constructing it was that it actually became far too representative of the cafe. I wanted to see how far I could pull it back until it became ambiguous.

Once I had pulled it back I discovered that, as a landscape, exploring it at different scales made it appear like an entirely new world to explore. It got me thinking about how other people, uncertain of what the original place was, would want to explore it. How big or small would they think is the appropriate size they should be to traverse the landscape? I wanted to explore this idea further, but my knowledge of unity cut me off from allowing players to interact with it.