Discovery

SCI-Arc is pleased to announce Discovery: a story about rooftops, airships, robots, and inflatables, a new exhibition by design faculty Damjan Jovanovic, opening October 28 in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Made in partnership with Lidija Kljakovic, the exhibition is a project of architectural worldmaking, including an installation exploring games, ecology, and artificial intelligence.

Discovery is an exhibition based on an ecological video game and simulation of a near-future version of downtown Los Angeles. The installation features videos, projections, a large-scale inflatable, and an interactive video game. The project was born out of observations of an emerging rooftop culture of urban gardening and alternative lifestyles in downtown LA during the pandemic.

The exhibition features a narrative that follows The Airborne Collective, a radical environmental hacker group seeking to make a flourishing roofscape ecosystem and unleash optimism in the face of looming ecological threat. Operating between the languages of design, fashion, and video games, Discovery extends Lifeforms.io work on systems and aesthetics of simulated worlds into the space of a physical installation.

Damjan Jovanovic is an architect, educator and software designer, based in Los Angeles. He currently works as Full-Time faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Damjan finished the post-graduate Master of Arts in Architecture degree at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany in 2014, where he afterwards worked as design faculty. Damjan’s work centers on the development of experimental architectural software, and his interests lie in investigating the culture and aesthetics of software platforms, as well as questions of contemporary architectural education, authorship and creativity.

Lidija Kljakovic is Co-Founder of game design studio Lifeforms.io. She is a designer and digital artist, working at the intersection between video games and fashion and specializing in procedural design and creation of digital life forms. Lidija is a multidisciplinary creative with experience ranging from hard core architectural design and development of real-world high rises in Frankfurt, Germany to running a successful fashion brand and store in Belgrade, Serbia. She holds a Master degree from Belgrade University of Architecture. Her work was exhibited internationally, most recently at Ars Electronica and Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany.