A Miniature City of Collective Imagination

mini_polis is a scale model of downtown Minneapolis built in collaboration with community participants in a series of “build workshops.” The mini_polis team, SocialScultpre, will collect place-based hopes and memories at the workshops and create a multimedia interface within the finished city model to share these stories. The completed mini_polis will be a physical platform for activities, from city classroom to stage set, and a magnet for social media.

Finished Sculpture

mini_polis is a map of Downtown Minneapolis, installed on the front yard of the Minneapolis Convention Center. The base is a low wood platform that the miniature buildings are secured to, and ADA-accessible “highways” ramp up to and over. About half of these buildings are built by participants at workshops, and are decorated with various wood pieces and writing describing the builder’s dreams for the city. Other buildings carry the dreams of residents who were not able to attend workshops, but wrote in their responses. The streetscape of mini_polis is painted with chalkboard paint, allowing visitors to respond to builder’s dreams, as well as make their own place-specific comments about the city.

At night, internal LED lights brighten the windows of many of the buildings, twinkling on an off on a programmed pattern controlled by an Arduino circuit. When a visitor approaches the multimedia station and presses a button, the lights go off, then prerecorded audio plays, telling the stories and dreams of building workshop participants as their neighborhood light up.

mini_polis is a vehicle to carry builders’ and visitors’ voices, but it is also a physical platform for understanding the city. The simple act of walking along a walkway and looking down on the buildings nearby allows a viewer to see the whole neighborhood unhurriedly, unlike the limited view they get when they drive that real highway in a car.  mini_polis will inspire all kinds of people to come up with their own uses and activities.

mini_polis from jon reynolds on Vimeo.

mini_polis Team

SocialSculpture is a collaboration of artists bent on bringing creative agency to everyone. They see making as fulfilling a basic human need, and making in the public sphere as an inherently positive act that everyone should have access to. They are excited about the new emphasis on public participation in the Creative City Challenge, and would like to offer their unique blend of teaching, making, and collaborating skills for consideration.

In their social art practice, they identify familiar objects and social habits – small social occasions, nostalgic children’s games, familiar rituals of hospitality. They deploy them in a way that channels the urban energy of the Twin Cities, and allows people moving down their well-trodden paths of habit to shift just enough to come into contact with one another, or have an experience that nudges them out of the ordinary.

For more information on mini_polis follow their blog >>>; download this pdf.