A group project done in collaboration with Shaun Duffy, Patrick Fritz, Will Hellwarth, Lauren Lewis, and Nonny de la Peña, for Alex McDowell’s world building class. A play on the paradox of the “Ship of Theseus,” a questioning of the city’s identity changes as each of the components have slowly been exchanged or altered over time. Each member of the group wrote their own story, readable where their events occurred within the city, making the project something of a walkable anthology of events spanning genres from slice-of-life to detective mystery to urban body horror.

The City of Theseus hinged of the idea of ubiquitous computing expanding into programmable matter. The substance, which we named “Rasa”, had definable limits, but the idea of a mercurial, reusable, and codeable building material proved a rich source for stories that reflected modern day ideas and anxieties. The city, isolated and insular in the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch, roughly a century from the present day, reflects digital spectres made physical.

I developed a series of tools that allowed fast prototyping and development of a navigable scale model of the entire city. Research into energy use, space-per-person, and precedents of hyper-urbanized settings like Kowloon Walled City provided resources for grounding the loftier ideas the group had in verisimilitude.