Overall, this project’s main focus is on the role of “context” in architecture and its various simulations. Context will be considered as it relates to current issues of contemporary technology, information, data sharing, and audience interaction. In this project, we explored the evolution of object/context relationship with different digital tools.

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The artist Ian Cheng defines the activity of “Worlding” as the introduction of meaning into the open-ended chaos of a simulation. The game scholar James P. Carse introduces the idea of Infinite Game as a game whose purpose is not winning, but continuing the play. In this project, we work towards exploring these two concepts as a possible format for architectural visuality. Within the digital regime, simulations are the default, host format, where all previous genres of representation and ideas of pictorial space are collapsed and reformulated. Simulations replace animations as a preferred format of the ever changing digital work, as they bring ideas of contingency, randomness and real time as defaults that a designer need to contend with. 

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The subject matter for the simulations is the garden, as a perfect analogue to the ordered open-endedness and chaotic beauty of a simulation, deployed through the rigorous rules of a technical apparatus. Our work revolves 
around two techniques: proceduralism, which introduces systems based procedural modeling as means of producing large datasets of content; and game engine based open-ended simulations as the new pictorial space of production. 

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The seminar, we tried to establish a new pipeline of production, where the boundaries of pre-production, production and post-production become fuzzy. We worked with Houdini for the procedural modeling, and Unreal Engine for the aesthetic simulation.

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In our garden world, we want to tell a story about the past, present and future of the ruins in a forest. Our scene records a barren scene in an area of mountain forest in the early 21st century, but it was once a lush garden castle. People destroyed the environment on which they lived in wars, and greedy people consumed precious natural resources. However, what does this seemingly lifeless scene leave behind? The secondary coarse twig pine forest and the barren pumice thin soil secondary to the forest are perfect places to breed new life. The emergence of novas and flowers is like a turning point in a desperate situation, telling us that even at the “end of the world” of now or future, hope exists. Here, the nova is a symbol of hope in desperation.