Archive for December, 2005
HMC Medialab do great work but they also have been encouraging experimentation between the arts, science and technology disciplines particularily in the West of England. Check out their projects Lacuna, Hyperfabric, and their multi-award winning project Eyeborg
Recently Adam Montandon from HMC interviewed me about my InteractiveArchitecture.org Blog and my perspective on the future of interactive architecture.
Read Article
image from “Research Spaces Exhibition“, Materialization of Practice in Art & Architecture
The interview is also available in the About section of this website
December 22nd, 2005
Great Quote I thought I’d put on since I was recently asked what the relationship between cyberspace and interactive architecture is.
Cyberspace, RIP by Karl Schroeder from Future Now
“It’s this overlay of the virtual over the real that makes the cyberspace metaphor obsolete. Cyberspace, after all, is conceived as something like the astral plane–a digital reality that exists “elsewhere.” But it’s precisely this “elsewhere” that’s being eroded by applications like Davison and Reid’s augmented reality system. Increasingly, the digital world is being married to the real world, with surprising results.
My personal theory is this: when the only way to use a computer was to sit still and look through a little window (the screen) into a virtual space, the cyberspace metaphor worked best for us. But with cell phones, PDAs and geographical applications such as store-finders and the proposed “taxi” key for cell phones (which simply summons the nearest cab when you press it), we’re no longer staring through a window into cyberspace. The window’s been broken, and the cyber world has spilled out into our own space.”
December 21st, 2005
With a 10-floor palace of glass at the ritziest of all Tokyo addresses, Chanel launched its biggest boutique in the world. The store opened December 4, 2004. This lavish building in the Ginza district features a concert hall, a restaurant by celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse, and 1,300 square meters of shopping space featuring designer items sold nowhere else.
Designed by American architect Peter Marino, the 56-meter high building is set to dominate the architecture of the elite Chuo-dori avenue. It has a massive curtain wall of glass that encapsulates a nest-shaped block of aluminum in Chanel handbags’ signature tweed pattern.
The glass facade will light up Ginza each dusk to dawn with 700,000 embedded light-emitting diodes. The interactive system consists of over 6 kilometers of control cables, 5 floors of industrial control closets, 3 master control computers, and 65,000 micro computers processing over 32 trillion instructions per second.
An innovative system of 1,120 square meters of canvas roll blinds and state-changing electronic privacy glass allows office workers to see out by day but provides a black background for the display at night. The first of its kind in the world, the facade of a building becomes a giant television screen that delights passers-by.
From inside and outside the LED technology appears transparent, allowing the office worker a clear an unobstructed view of the world during the day. The street view presents the worlds largest black and white video wall at night. What I like is how thisinteractive architecture has intergrated within the chanel branding to bring something new to its aesthetic.
December 21st, 2005
This is an Installation that was at Battery Park in New York a while ago by Jim Campbell whose website has dozens of his installation works that play with light, movement and ideas about memory.
“In Primal Graphics, a shadowy figure runs across an empty field. Up close, it is apparent that the lifelike movement is the result of pulsating lights, the screen is actually a 10 x 13 foot grid composed of 192 light bulbs. To create this work, Campbell recorded his subject in digital video, a medium that converts live action to millions of pixels; the artist then reduced the number of pixels until the image reached the verge of perceptibility, leaving just enough data to retain the outlines of reality.”
Jim Campbell also placed 168 Light Bulbs, in a matrix for the entrance of Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Interactive Architecture with low-fi lighting systems have a special aesthetic that you don’t find in the new hypersurface technologies on the market
December 20th, 2005
Interactive Facades are appearing all over the place at the moment and here’s a product that is selling it to the commercial market to entice shoppers in through inital interactive events that can occur inside or remotely from the architecture.
Displax developed by Edigma, combines rear projection holographic screens with finger tracking. Interaction is started by proximity detection.
from Future Feeder
December 18th, 2005
Ubiquitous Computing integrates computation into the environment, rather than having computers which are distinct objects. An major aspect of interactive architecture “Ubicomp” is an essential part of embedding architecture with digital systems.
Here’s an English translation of an interview recently conducted by the French magazine Internet Actu with Adam Greenfield who’s releasing a book soon called Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
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December 16th, 2005
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