Urban Codemakers

This project just finished up in February this year. My role was to develop a visual language for urban codemaking, IDEOTAG laser cut design and connect these with a street game for the Urban Codemakers.

The Urban Codemakers operated from Guildford Lane Gallery between August 2010 and February 2011. Their urban renewal project sought to rezone the city through play. It consists of three guilds, street signage, 100+ blog posts, four blogs, a street game, 768 IDEOTAGs, a public demonstration, a public information video in Federation square, a series of academic articles, and three urban planning proposals for the City of Melbourne. An archive of their activity is at urbancodemakers.net

The project transforms the Guildford Lane Complex into a laneway populated by guilds from the Micronation of Ludea. The ‘urban codemakers’ of these guilds investigate and cultivate networks that shape urban space. The history of the laneway is activated via an imagined future transformed by socio-economic and cultural forces. The guild signs are portals to a crossmedia narrative of this story.

While playful, the concept critiques and investigates the space in which it is situated by articulating the practice of ‘urban codemaking’. This is the main activity of the guilds. In this practice the urban fabric of Melbourne/Ludea is explored via media ecologies made of networks of systems and rules that are social, institutional, spatial, commercial and cultural. The story behind this practice by the guilds and tribes of the Ludea is told via a crossmedia narrative linked to the installation in situ.