Thesis Review is a collection of conversations, statements and inquiries into the current state of thesis in academia. Thesis projects give a glimpse into the current state of the education arena while painting a picture for the future of practice. 

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Games of Deletion makers Runze Zhang & Alessio Grancini on their process, their project, their tangential thoughts and where they hope to see their thesis grow towards into the future. 

What is your thesis?

Games of Deletion is a mixed reality game that requires multiple players gathered together in front of an urban mural space. Murals are already a form of augmentation of space. They take you out of where you are by interfacing through a vertical image that disrupts the horizontality of the urban-environment. From Graffiti (in a narrow sense) as an act of vandalism to murals as a political act with permission, and now to the AR/MR as a phygital (physical and digital) art form by using 2D images as trackers, the double-hacking enables the tagging, as a signature of space, to be the tracking of the Augmented Reality.

Games of Deletion is an interface designed as an actual app using architectural moves removing volumes and information from the contents to bring multiple users together in the urban blank space. As we investigated projects concerning the distortion of perception of the built environment, dealing with the exterior, Bernardo Rossellino separates buildings within public spaces to reveal a distant landscape in the city of Pienza. Inversely, Gordon-Matta Clark, in Conical Intersect, is engaging the interior by physically cutting out part of the building.

The main scope of the game is balancing between Image, Virtual elements and Physical site through disruption and re-composition.

What was your inspiration for the thesis?

We would think of this inspiration more as an accumulation of senses for the surrounding through process. It is more appropriate to consider it as a matrix of inspirations. If we simply put this thesis as an AR/MR mural game, then we have three different inspirations from different sources for each keyword.

First, lets talk about AR/MR. Although we had already used AR for studios and seminars before we decided to consider doing an AR project for thesis, the key incentive is one specific scene in the movie Blade Runner 2049 where after officer K retires from LAPD and arrives at his home, Joi synchronizes her holographic program with Mariette, so she is able to control Mariette's body. It was a moment when we felt just by overlapping the two of physical and digital figure, it is already giving a sense of a third person which is nobody but in-between the existing mindset of the two similar yet disparate visual images.

Then, the inspiring impetus for the settlement of the thesis subject was indeed from the murals in art district. However, it was our working on a specific theme and technology for three semesters that allowed us to understand the limitations of the tools, be familiar with almost all kinds of jurors’ opinions and attitudes about applying AR in architecture and eventually lead us to think in a direction of real-scale/urban-scale interactive experience.  

The last one is game. This game is not quite the game everybody is having in their mind. It is a gamification in the experience space. For this one, we did not get galvanized by any specific case, but a myriad of existing products can exemplify this idea of moving from the physical to the virtual to the experiential. More importantly, entertainment is also a service for people to behave in a certain way to create value for themselves, and if this value is intersecting both physical and digital world, it can be designed to harness the contingency in game and utilize it in further architecture/urban intervention; not to mention, entertainment is very relevant in the context of LA.

How did it change over the course of the process?

Obviously, those who have been seasoned in architecture usually ask, “why is it a game?”, “why is it for entertainment?” But for younger generation, we usually ask “where is entertainment?”, “where is the game?” This gap in cultural background and generation played an interestingly paramount role in the further development of our project.

For us, in the beginning, as we explained in the inspiration question, the key is to create a phygitally gamified experience in space. And because of the knowledge we gained during the developing with AR/MR technologies, we were enamored of the rules of the game and the realization of the actual app. But, thanks to Devyn and Peter, we were dragged to the right track of the fight, for most of the people in architecture still not see what we are seeing in this direction. So, they thought we should focus more in answering the question from architecture and firmly establish the discourse which proved necessary. On second thought, we felt the urge to share with everyone how we considered and represent it in a way almost everyone can understand before we could finally move to those subsequent steps. 

What are other angles you want to continue working on?

Games of Deletion starts as a Game, but during its analysis, it reveals several attachments to Politics. One of them is the acceptance of a Digital Property, that currently has not been defined yet and that in the future might be a highly relevant discourse in architecture and might change the way people experience and interact within a city. Another one is the duplicating urban visual system based on virtual deletion (depth, rotation and position), which frees itself from the Cartesian configuration of the built environment and further potentially creates a new Scopic Regime through the nesting of worlds to be revealed.

How does your thesis fit in within the discipline?

The game, re-appropriating the legacy of murals, re-animates an obsolete understanding of how one enlivens blank space in the city, and change the way people read and image the city. We collected around 100 murals in the city of Los Angeles and selected a few cases from this database to compose the scenes showcased in the screens during final presentation.

Hacking physical images, Games of Deletion infra-structure a contemporary virtual contexture. [contextually interfacing multiple locations] The verticality of murals exemplifies the disruption of the horizontal, vision we are comfortable with in the understanding of space at an urban scale. We focused on the city of Los Angeles during thesis, but we consider applying this concept to a larger scale in future developments of the project.

We used mural as a medium and the compatible public space in front of them as urban stage of the augmented reality game scenarios. The game takes advantage of the accidental nature of an individual’s experience intersecting specific urban blank spaces. When individuals begin to accumulate in the proximity of the site, it turns into an accidental collective and collaborative game. Each site has his own rule related to the urban conditions in front of the mural. The rules keep changing relatively to the life span of the murals. Players will cooperate in the disruption of the scene, re-activating the urban blank spaces through Games of Deletion.

What did you discover during the process that you did not foresee?

Many accidents happened during the execution of the testing in front of those mural spaces in LA. From the physical point of view, for instance, the time you should choose to be at a specific sight ties closely in the experience you will get. Specifically, if you want to experience a pleasant encounter with a mural facing East, like the Bloom in LA Art district, you would better finish all the process before noon. Otherwise the direct sunshine will black out all the content from your visual experience. Another part unexpected is the random life span of not only the murals but also the murals sites. We already knew that murals generally have their relatively short life span comparing to architecture which is a good opportunity to dig more out of the topic of this virtual and ephemeral architecture related to the period of the projects at a specific place. But the private property vs. public property is another huge topic which might be more potential and interesting, yet we did not have time to develop for the thesis. And dealing with the real situation, this might be the biggest concern and might be where to start. While from the digital point of view, most of them are technical issues, like the position and orientation of origin problem for multi-player experience, the stability of different tracking systems etc.

How do you see this thesis progressing into your career?

We both think of our career without being restricted inside the boundary of existing chain of yielding buildings and structures, because it is not the focus in the professional world letting people understand this is related closely to architecture. Basically, this thesis gives us already much freedom to choose the direction of our career. A few architecture firms are exploring XR technologies and researching on the potential application in the existing pipeline. We, to be honest, would prefer to develop specific digital experience for specific existing physical space or cooperate with client or firms creating some physical intervention for digital experience simultaneously. For now, we mainly concentrate in the form of a mobile app for the Arts District; the key is more about the quality, specificity and how to be resourceful and get opensource at the same time.

What were the key moments within your thesis?

The most important moment that put the bases for what has been our final presentation has been the week right after the midterm review.

In fact, our project has been developed in two phases mainly.

Before midterm we were thinking to build a full-working Augmented Reality mobile game. We both took the Thesis semester as the last opportunity for learning something new that might be having defined our career post-graduation. For the first time, we started focusing more on content and learning process rather than representation. Architecture generally is a practice based on the production. The interdisciplinary core of design is often a superficial approach of a not-well known field. Production limits the time for research, in every environment. On this line, the academic field gave us the opportunity to spend time on research and we are proud of the work that has been done in the first half of the thesis semester.

We both think of our career without being restricted inside the boundary of existing chain of yielding buildings and structures, because it is not the focus in the professional world letting people understand this is related closely to architecture.

Unfortunately, our pin-up was receiving many negative feedbacks since the representation aspect was clearly not our priority, and this was interfering with the communication between us and the audience. After the midterm review and a brief conversation with Jose Sanchez [USC faculty, architect and game designer], we decided to invest time on CGI representation, Physical Models, Writings and strategy for engaging at our best the audience. A very important suggestion we received by Peter Testa, our advisor, has been that every project needs to be targeting its own audience. Hybrids concept unfortunately have a very short life.

Finally, since we were aiming to do an Architectural Thesis project, we started treating our "Game idea" as an Architecture project. We stopped to be "outsider" and we invest time on any conventional media as videos, images and models. We started to involve a lot of students, recording them during their real game session or for post produced videos. We documented in real time around 40 different sites in the city of Los Angeles, showing how users can interact with the space through Games of Deletion. It was suddenly becoming an urban project.

Nevertheless, the fact that we were working as a team, helped us a lot to keep building mobile phone apps, turning fiction in real-time technology at the same time. 

What do you wish you would have known before thesis?

We can't complain about the fact that thesis guidelines have not been provided on time. Devyn Weiser is well known at SCI-Arc for her perfection in scheduling and providing accurate references, fortunately she was our advisor with Peter Testa. However, our project continuously dealt with real-scale content. It would have been a huge improvement, being aware of our final thesis presentation space from the beginning of the semester, or at least one week before and it will be ideal if we can move our models to the final presentation spots beforehand to test the real-time demo. We know this can sounds absurd, but the truth is it is not the same Augmented Reality is treated as designer treat physical construction.

What other Thesis projects were on your radar?

Not many other projects were investigating AR as we did, but somehow, we were craving an aesthetic definition that many other students have been able to accomplish at a very early stage.

Different from what was usually thought normal in SCIArc thesis projects, the strength of "Games of Deletion" is in the creation of a diverse system to apply in a city environment. The game rejects the establishment of a self-referential form. This is an anti-architectural design approach. GoD were dealing with the deletion of material. At a first sight, the project might be representing an abstract section of a building. We both agreed in looking for solutions that detach this idea from the representation of the concept we wanted to express.

Among all the others, a project that has been very close to us is "House in Chains, House in No Chains" by Rebecca Tesia Park, M.Arch I student .

We quote here the original project description by Rebecca Tesia Park.

"To see the HOUSE IN CHAINS is to ask, how does one erase the perception? What are the chains? A list of potential suspects all points to "the working space" itself. If percepts is the object of perception, the delaminates working space suspended between screen and object, between 2D and 3D, between drawing, image and model, is not be form of a working space construct. " Rebecca's project deals with space existentially. Our use of Augmented Reality has been from the beginning, the wish to prove that AR can be more than a representation tool and that needs to be a media natively treated into architecture. Architecture never specializes, architecture creates and consult. This statement does not aim to downgrade a profession but reflects on the possibilities that this field has for mastering its future. As Rebecca's states "[...]the object of perception delaminates working space[...]". Working space is space and both need to be engaged in the same way, without distinction. Perception is the only media we have, and it shouldn't be categorized as physical and digital perception.

How did your institution help or guide through thesis?

SCI-Arc organizes the thesis semester in a "vertical studio format". This method helps students staying on track in a semester where it is very easy to get lost for the apparent amount of free time, that students never experiencing during the previous core-semesters.

We didn't find this format very helpful for our specific case, because dealing with AR, it is almost impossible predicting the time needed for finishing one assignment. When we were required to exhibit our work, we often were still in the process of analyzing some of our working-material and in the end, the review preparation was affecting our overall long-term timeline. We have never put ourselves in a position where the projects needed to be slightly changed or "re-rendered". Every review underlined how this thesis project has not been linear but with many ups and downs. Going against the format, has been partially our own decision.

The greatest help that the institution provided us during "Games of Deletion" has been the freedom for pursuing this project until the end. The interdisciplinary path that our school offered us during our master’s program is a remarkable quality.

Freedom is scary, and the project needs to be taken seriously for finding our own selves as persons first, then as designers or artists. It is hard finding a formula that can successfully be applied to all the students

What do you wish could have been different?

This question embraces a much larger topic that does not necessarily deal with the thesis period only.

Generally, we believe that Schools of Architecture should be introducing core-classes of computer science in Undergrad and Grad programs. We might be passionate about the use of technology into the design process, but it's undeniable the fact that in this era there is a huge need of 3D generalists and developers in the design market. We both have a scientific background and the transition from a scientific high school program to an artsy scenario as Architecture claims to have, which has been very useful. We always ended up troubleshooting on our own and it would have been great having a support from an internal figure at the institution.

However, AR is an emergent technology and it's understandable the fact that Architecture Schools are slowly accepting it as a new way of digital representation.

If you could do this again, what would you change?

As we mentioned previously, this project locates itself between what we can consider representation tooling and AR social-platform creation. Every step we took to arrive to the end has been crucial for the understanding of the media we have now, we do not regret any of the time spent on learning and we are proud about every negative review experience.

What do you think the current state of Thesis is within Architecture and how can it improve?

We do believe a thesis project is absolutely a must for any student that is approaching the end of the studies.

Freedom is scary, and the project needs to be taken seriously for finding our own selves as persons first, then as designers or artists. It is hard finding a formula that can successfully be applied to all the students. From our personal experience, several deadlines in a short time do not help qualities as creativity and research. On the other hand, if we think about the profession as Architects, deadlines are probably the most important factor to be aware of.

Furthermore, we wish that the thesis project would be shrinking the gap between academia and profession.

Often, Architects find themselves to study around 6-7 years, ending up having great expectations about their career as creative minds. This is the reason why, many young professionals merge into other architecture-relate field where there is a wider quantity of freedom for expressing themselves.

The thesis semester should push the students to start networking with different environments outside of the institution. The students should be motivated to involve the larger number of professionals into their own project and put the foundation for what could be a very close future career.

Researching into a field as Augmented Reality, let us connect with a lot of important personalities in the city of Los Angeles. Without this attitude, we couldn't even try to continue this project post-thesis semester as we are doing now.