Toy Hack Digital Metropolis

Alex May collaborated with Exploring Senses and Phoenix Brighton on Toy Hack Digital Metropolis, a two-day project for Brighton Digital Festival held on 18 and 19 September 2015. Developed for thirty participants aged 13 to 19, the workshop invited young people to hack toys, build a cardboard city for them to inhabit, create animations, and then use May’s video-mapping software to transform the whole environment into a projected digital metropolis.

What matters here is the way the project turned technical tools into a shared process of making. Rather than separating digital media from physical construction, the workshop moved between altered objects, handmade architecture, animation, and projection. That allowed participants to see how digital images could be shaped by the materials and spaces around them instead of existing only on screens.

For May, the project sits clearly within a wider practice built around projection, perception, and the unstable meeting point between software and physical form. Using the same video-mapping approach associated with Painting With Light, he adapted that method for a collaborative public setting in which experimentation, play, and collective construction became the work’s central logic. The final exhibition in the main gallery at Phoenix Brighton made that process public rather than treating it as something secondary to the result.