Archaeology of a City Mine

3D scans form the basis for a versatile identity for an exhibition, an accompanying catalog, and a digital archive.

Archaeology of a City Mine is part of several research projects in which the art and design collective anima ona explores left over resources and their possibilities of reusing them as alternative building materials. Over a period of two years, they visited the Stuttgart 21 construction site and collected building rubble. Through close collaboration, the idea emerged to 3D-scan the discovered objects and make them accessible by creating a comprehensive catalog and a digital archive.

To exhibit their research results, anima ona built a cube of loam within the gallery space. A bench also made out of loam invited visitors to watch videos of the 3D scans on small screens embedded into the walls or to explore the printed exhibition catalog.

The sequentially structured exhibition catalog contains all 3D objects and their respective textures, several photo and video series, as well as an index with information on the weight, volume, material, and dimensions of the found objects.

In addition to the digitally processed information, 24 frames of 24 videos by designer Tamara Wirth are printed on 24 pages of the book in the style of a flip book.

The digital archive displays all found objects and presents them in different customizable views: as 3D scans with and without textures, as silhouettes, as unwrapped textures, or as blank data.

On desktop devices, the 3D objects dynamically align their perspective to the mouse pointer, while on mobile devices they adapt to the direction of scrolling.