Archive for February, 2006
I have just been reminded of a project Ralph de Rijke of the Waag showed me a year ago called ‘ Amsterdam RealTime ‘. The website for the project hasn't been updated in some time unfortunately. Essentially the piece was made for the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive. The Waag Society together with Esther Polak set up the project which included developing a GPS tracking system that traced the movements of participants who carried portable tracing devices around the city with them.
Videos of Map's Growth
“Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attempts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city's users.”
The data was mapped onto a black background as the GPS data was gathered a map of the participants paths through the city slowly grew creating some really lovely images as well as a few unexpected results including people attempting to draw images over large parts of the map without any idea how accurate they looked. Ralph told me about some guys who got on a boat with the tracking equipment and did some drawings off the coastline free from the confines of the street layouts. It immediately reminded me of the ancient biomorphs and geoglyphs of the Nazca Desert that have puzzled scientist and historians ever since they were rediscovered in the 1920's.
February 21st, 2006
An interactive installation exhibited at the Prague Biennale. ‘Invisibles' by biot(h)ing uses holosonic speakers to create sound patterns projected into an interactive space. These speakers isolate individual cones of sound, creating a counterintuitive experience for the visitors as they move through different vibrations of sonar projections. At the same time LCD Screens display streams of information as it crystallizes and becomes visible through pulses of dynamic morphologies of 3D Cells scripted in animation software.
These crystallized streams may also be affected by the physical environment through an interactive sensor field. At the core of the audio/visual/physical interface is an interactive sound-programming environment that alters conventional forms of musical composition through the incorporation of algorithmically based processes.
biot(h)ing is the research-design laboratory of alisa andrasek – creating and studying algorithmically derived structures in virtual and physical environments.
February 20th, 2006
“It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.”
From Donald Knuth's 1974 ACM Turing Award Lecture, Computer Programming as an Art . More recommended reading at Babar K Zafar's Classic Texts in Computer Science .
via Tom Cardens post on Computing for Emergent Architecture
February 18th, 2006
More inflatable wonders to behold. Pneumatic Parliament by Peter Sloterdijk and Gesa Mueller von der Hagen , still at conceptual stage, a political piece of inflatable architecture where a lightweight transportable dome could be quickly installed to provide a place of government for up to 160 inhabitants. This mocking proposal brings a 'sarcastic thrust to the pretended western democracies' supremacy, and to their claim of exporting their own model to other states' of the world. Check out the Storyboard .
via wmmna via neural
February 17th, 2006
HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) reverse cultural engineers the technological systems that surround us: From transport design to pollution monitoring, from public advertisement to meteorology, from architecture to public lightning. Their work seeks to go back in time, re-work past and as a result, re-phrase the existing into a new critical usage, a social function, with the spectator in its epicentre. Here's a quick synopsis of their projects over the past couple of years that I found most relevant to interactive architecture
Interactive Architecture related Projects
‘Atteindre le Silence'
‘Atteindre le Silence' is a site-specific work that amplifies the vibrations of a space. The installation rendered the listed parquet floor into a sensitive surface, so that as people walked, they caused fluctuations in light and triggered sounds in the space. The idea corresponds to the past and present usage of the space; which was built as a grand ballroom and now serves as a space for theatre, dance and exhibitions. Following the symmetry and pattern of the rococo architecture, an interactive electronic system was integrated with the interior so that it is hardly noticeable to the visitor. It operated as an oversized electronic circuit, designed to metamorphose any micro vibrations within the space. The salon of the château became a reactive space that was stirred by those who moved within it. ‘Atteindre le silence' is a work that asks people to be still. As people moved, any vibrations on the floor manifestly shifted electrical voltages around the space. The force, duration and location of vibrations coming from the ballroom floor determined the sound oscillations in space and altered the intensity of the light pulses coming from the chandeliers.
Bruit rose
Bruit rose (Pink noise in English) is a musical term that describes a random electronic noise across all sound frequencies which sounds tolerable for the human ear. The interaction of this work is based on visualising the ambient sounds in the environment aswel as the passerby.
The light emmitting panels of the work are usually used to divulge numerically formatted information. Here, they are instead détourné from this didatic function and serve as an animated visual, disengaged from all the gloss that usually occupies this urban advertising space.
LoFi
LoFi tranforms as architectural facade into a graphical equaliser, that responds to the music played inside the concert room of the venue.
light brix
Modular light system for architecture, which reacts to the electromagnetic fields generated by touch.
Twilight
Twilight unfolds the potential of interactivity within an aesthetic dimension. It begins with a paper windmill offered to the visitor to blow onto. This action triggers a wave of glimmering light that propagates across the screen, floating in space, composed of 256 fragile paper pixels, each one consisting of an LED.
The movement of light depends on the force of the air that is propagated: a gentle blow will create a static image whilst a harder blow will carry a tide of light, faster and more dynamic. The action of the visitor induces an acoustic response and the environment seems to begin to breath.
Via New Media & Interactivity
February 16th, 2006
p>I'm always a little sceptical when engineers claim to created real 3D displays but this report from DailyTech sounds like there might finally be some convincing if not a little low-res Holodeck style projects in the near future. The obvious next step will then be some kind of interactive position and motion sensing for the immaterial interface.
Research Website
“By creating plasma in open air with lasers, Japanese scientists are working on a true 3D display . The Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) announced an exciting breakthrough in optoelectronics — a working three dimensional display. The display does not rely on any sort of optical illusion or disorientation. Instead, infrared lasers are aligned to converge and create small amounts of plasma. The plasma acts as a floating “dot” on top of the laser grid.
The infrared laser pulses across several reflectors so that 100 dots can be created per second. The initial reports from AIST are a little light on details, but it appears as though the plasma dots can be drawn up to several meters away from the laser source. It also appears as though the device needs a vapor source with specific electron/ion content in order to generate the dots.”
Now I should be most excited about this in terms of its potential applications in Interactive Architecture but secretly I'm just waiting for the minature R2D2 toys with inbuilt 3D projection of Princess Leia saying ‘ Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. Your my only hope.'
thanks to Usman for the tip off.
February 14th, 2006
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