Discovery: A story about rooftops, airships, robots, and inflatables

Discovery: A story about rooftops, airships, robots, and inflatables is an installation exploring themes of worldmaking, ecology and artificial intelligence.

Born out of observations of an emerging rooftop culture of urban gardening and alternative lifestyles in downtown LA during the pandemic, the story of Discovery follows The Airborne Collective, a radical environmental hacker group seeking to make a flourishing roofscape ecosystem and unleash hope and optimism in the face of looming ecological threat.

Operating between the languages of design, fashion and video games, the project extends Lifeforms.io work on systems and aesthetics of simulated worlds into the space of a physical installation.

Jovanovic will be joined by fellow SCI-Arc faculty and acting History and Theory Co-Coordinator John Cooper for a public conversation on the exhibition on November 18 at 6pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall. Watch on Vimeo.

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.