With this project I wanted to explore the idea of digital ownership with NFTs compared to the traditional ownership we're familiar with in real life. NFT's are essentially about owning a little, unique piece of the internet.

Traditional, “real life” ownership goes way back. Owning properties / inhabiting land is one of the oldest concepts of ownership known to mankind. Ever since we abondened the nomadic hunter - gatherer lifestyle some 10.000 years ago and settled on farms and villages along rivers. This concept has stuck with us until present day.

This project is about taking the traditional idea of property ownership and digitising it, giving people the opportunity to own a digital copy of a real, physical space. It's about taking atoms and converting them into bits.

research

Before I ended up with the jigsaw puzzles I messed around a bit with different formats. This basically started off as an experiment related to scale. With tilt shift photography landscape photography gets this miniature like feeling which I wanted to replicate. So I scanned scenes around the city and mixed it together with more traditional still life compositions to create a fun contrast. Basically using photogrammetry as a way to almost paint with photography.

Continued experimenting with different formats, with these more deconstructed buildings inspired by an installation by Richard Wilson. But finally I settled on a less is more approach to keep them as is as this made more sense in terms of doing a collection of multiple buildings. E.g. It could’ve been a collection in itself having just one building with a lot of different formats.

process

I chose to scan older, more worn down buildings as I think they not only make for more interesting objects but they have such much texture and personlity compared to many newer "architect" designed buildings.

Photogrammetry results are usually very polygon dense and hard to work with, which is why I decided to go with a camera mapping approach. Stitching together a bunch of picture to create a texture void of any perspective. The goal here is to get it as flat as possible so that it is possible to just project the image on to a 3D model.

Camera mapping in Cinema 4D. This way you can project an image onto a basic model and model after the image.

further development

It would be super fun to make a city builder using all the assets, where people can synchronise, for example their tezos wallet, and build their own little city diorama using the buildings they own.