Archive for September, 2007
Dazed Digital recently published a series of three exclusive documentaries on artists who work with light as their medium. Two of these in particular, Jason Bruges Studio and United Visual Artists are common sights on this blog, producing a number of impressive large scale interactive installations in galleries and exhibitions, as well as embedding responsive lighting technologies into public spaces, furniture and building facades.
UVA’s installation Echo - Tate Modern - June 2006
If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes, what technologies they use and how these companies came about in the first place, these videos give a unique insight into the stories behind their day to day routines as well as their aspirations and future projects in the pipeline. Alongside these commercial practices and in contrast to the scale of Jason Bruges and UVA, the final documentary is a more personal story about the art work of independent artist David Batchelor. His pieces fusing scuplture and light explore the concept of colour as a unique phenomenon: how colour is omnipresence in everyday experience, and how it transcends function and aesthetics to create its own symbolic orders.
Jason Bruges Studio Documentary
United Visual Artists Documentary
David Batchelor Documentary
September 29th, 2007
6.30pm Wednesday 3 October 2007
Sir Peter Cook, The Bartlett Chair of Architecture from 1991-2005, returns to the Bartlett in 2007 to open the 2007/08 International Lecture Series with his talk titled "2 Years of Gossip and Some Stuff Going On". Its open to the public so get their early to avoid disappointment. It is being held at the Darwin Lecture Theatre Located on Gower Street, London. Unfortunately I’m away in Canada next week at the ACADIA conference, so I won’t be able to go to it, but I was at his talk last year at the Bartlett and it was really good fun as you’d probably expect.
September 28th, 2007
Media Urbanism hosted by Mirjam Struppek was the second panel of the MediaArchitecture conference I recently attended. Mirjam began by highlighting the new challenges faced in urban design and planning caused by the use of media technologies, in particular, LED screens. The main focus was how these technologies have a social impact and how how cities have responded to these entering our public spaces. Along side the discussion on urbanism, individual projects were discussed by some of the panelists who are working in the field of interactive design and architecture.
Mirjam Struppek has been very active over the past couple of years organizing events such as Urban Screens 05 held in Amsterdam, and building up a great online resource for people interested in how the currently commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content. "We want to network and sensitise all engaged parties for the possibilities of using the digital infrastructure for contributing to a lively urban society, binding the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore creating local identity and engagement. The integration of the current information technologies support the development of a new integrated digital layer of the city in a complex merge of material and immaterial space that redefine the function of this growing infrastructure."
Malcom McCullough
Following Mirjam’s introduction Malcom McCullough spoke about how this new medium added another layer of information to the city and how information could be considered in itself a kind of pollution. He described how the ratio of information to knowledge is declining and the responses some cities have had to mediafacades that contain commercial content.
Sau Paulo following the ban on urban advertising
Malcom used the example of Sau Paulo where on January 1st, 2007, the city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal. The ban on what the mayor calls “visual pollution” was the culmination of a long battle between the city’s politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil’s economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past. More Images
Prof. Joachim Sauter - ART+COM - New Media in Public Space
ART+COM are a well known and highly regarded German interaction design studio who have done a number of public interactive installations. Joachim as a director spoke about their practice and their approach to using media technologies to create dynamic spatial experiences.
Renders of one of the projects Joachim Sauter discussed called Duality
"During the last years, “New” Media have advanced more and more from private and semi-public institutional spaces into public city space. The reasons for this are two fold. The necessary technologies have become cheaper, more easily manageable and more stable; users of city space are media literate, and the designers and decision makers are better educated and skilled."
In the design of media façades, ART+COM are directed by two principles stemming from “façade’s” etymological root ‘facies”, Latin for ‘face’. They design "the skin of a face, not a mask or make-up. This means that the media have to be an integral part of the architecture, not something added as an obvious later thought. The second principle is the face’s mimics and its expression. The narrative on the façade is thus expressive of the building, its architectural stance and its interior. The façade is a membrane from inside to outside and from outside to inside."
"Duality" completed
Joachim went through a number of projects which I can’t cover all of here. One project in particular which caught my eye was "Duality". Located on the bank of an artificial pond at the exit of the metro station Osaki. The project deals with the "duality between liquid / solid, real / virtual and water ripples / light waves. Pedestrians walk over a 6 x 6 meters large LED plane, installed right on the edge of the water. The LEDs are covered with translucent glass diffusing their light. With their steps, the passers-by provoke virtual waves on the LED plane, computed in real-time. When these waves hit the edge of the pond, they are extended into the water as real ripples. It looks really magical and brought a childish smile to my face with its combination of screen and kinetic technology.
see more of ART+COM’s projects here
Andrew Shoben - Greyworld - Transforming the City into an Urban Playground
Greyworlds "The Source"
Andrew spoke about ways of transforming the urban realm into a public playground. To allow some form of self-expression, through small interventions in the urban surround, in areas of the city that people see everyday but normally exclude and ignore. Using Greyworlds own projects such as The Source (2004) their 32m kinetic sculpture which opens the London market every morning at the London Stock Exchange as well as their much lower tech railings project , he presented how Play can be an intergral part of the experience of our whole built environment.
Greyworld Railings project
Andrew talked about how he wanted people to find emotional connections with their work and give little twists to the urban experience"Art for people on the way to the supermarket" as he put it. Greyworlds "Railings" project was a perfect example of this, working with the childish pleasure of running a stick along a set of railings to make a "clack-clack-clack" sound. Instead of a clack clack sound they tuned the railings so that when you ran a stick along them they it played "the Girl from Ipanema."
Michael Batz - Hamburg Art Ensemble: Scenographies of a City
Michael spoke of how Contemporary Lighting Master Plans define the underlying conditions for lighting public spaces: intelligent harmonization of all light sources on the urban stage in order to give the greatest flexibility while at the same time consuming as little energy as possible. "A new perception-oriented approach to lighting planning for architecture and urban areas is now becoming significant, in contrast to earlier technical-functional methods. Accentuated by the paradigm shift towards the “reflecting city” from the traditional stone and translucent (glass) cities, responsibilities for transforming the townscape and the city identity have now received political meaning."
panel - Mirjam Struppek, Malcom McCullough, Michael Batz, Andrew Shoben and Joachim Sauter
He also explained that any attempt to do justice to a locality must inevitably take into account the existing specific architecture. Basically, it is not a matter of ‘throwing’ light at a group of structures, but using light to accentuate them as a special treasure of the city. In other documentation of Michael I found this quote particularly interesting "Rhythmisation, characterisation, accentuation - concepts traditionally used in the theatre - are appropriate here. Atmosphere, emotion and changes in ways of viewing are qualities that have a major influence on the character of a city. Artistic concepts can be compositionally fruitful here: playing with tones and hierarchies of brightness, temporary strong chords over restful bass lines, the rejection of over-accentuation, deliberate omissions and the retention of the essence of darkness." A general discussion at the end focused on the problems each of the presenters had with the idea of the architecture being overwhelmed by screen technology. One mentioned that the architecture of the cityscape is scenographic enough and questioned if there was any need to embed stories when architecture can do that itself? I couldn’t agree more with this statement and I’m glad that the entire conference was focused on the really important question, how media technologies can go beyond "urban screens", beyond hi-tech billboard s for advertising and engage us in new types of scenographic and emotive experience. It was evident in the work of ART+COM and Greyworld that there is clearly a lot of potential, for spatial and time-based narration that could go beyond linear and undemocratic screens. The next morning I was lucky enough to be starting the 2nd day of talks with this issue in mind, and presented how I thought contemporary architecture and urban design could learn a lot from some of the mediaarchitecture of the 1950’s and 60’s… more on that soon.
September 27th, 2007
By Royal Appointment is a set of responsive chairs by Moritz Waldemeyer. As a person sits in the chair, an RGB colour sensor in the back reads the colour of their clothing. The colour LEDs on the back of the chair then gradually fade into the colour of the sitter. “This gives the individual sitting on it their own halo of light, or personal aura, evoking images of religious icons and kings”
via pixelsumo
September 26th, 2007
Unfortunately I’m away in Canada at the ACADIA conference while this event is being held but if your in London on the 2nd of October, check out This Happened organised by Chris O’Shea (Pixelsumo), Joel Gethin Lewis (United Visual Artists) and Andreas Muller (Nanika). This happened is a series of events focusing on the stories behind interaction design looking at process and experience more than just the final outcome. The speakers presenting at the upcoming event are listed below.
Crispin Jones
is a designer based in London. He will talk about the development of Tengu
Rory Hamilton
is a design consultant, former course leader of Interaction Design at RCA,
The Science Of
create science-based exhibitions and crossmedia products.
Massimo Banzi
is the co-fouder of the Arduino and the founder of Tinker.
Karsten Schmidt
(aka Toxi) is computational designer / artist and software developer.
September 25th, 2007
Here are some notes from the "New Technologies and New Materials" panel hosted by Peter Cornwell at last weeks Media Architecture Conference. As the opening panel it revealed the current technological developents in media-facade design and exposed the practical experiences of the speakers over a range of different approaches, programs and contexts. As the opening panel, it set the stage for discussing "the next step" and revealed the speed at which technological development is occuring.
Of course architectural design is in no small part, driven by the technologies available to it, and with the refinement of LED components originally used in LED advertising billboards we are seeing a growth in there use in the design of the built enviornment. At the same time the development of sustainable computing and network systems able to operate extensive façade data systems over long periods of time, has led to robust and economical systems that satisfy the requirements demanded by architects and building owners.
Ludger Hovestadt speaking
Architecture and Flusser’s Technical Images - Prof. Ludger Hovestadt
Ludger Hovestadt began the day with an entertaining talk which started with him describing how against the background of the information technologies, architecture has gained a new reality. A reality becoming ‘creamier and creamier’, a phrase that caught on, and was used by a number of later speakers. As a professor for architecture and CAAD at ETHZ where his interdisciplinary research involves architecture, computer science, mechanical engineering, robotics and cognitive psychology, he spoke about his current research which centres on the adaptation of technological developments made in other industries of expertise, into the building industry.
Example of Nano materials providing base materials for new technologies - The University of Toronto has developed a ’spray on’ solar collection material that is capable of capturing energy in the infra red spectrum
Looking through the technological development of the "information society", he described how the granularity of objects is becoming smaller and smaller, until today matter can be investigated and described at sub-atomic scale. "The Big Zoom" as he called it, gives us an undertanding of the materials available to us which has led us to reconstructing objects from their most fundamental parts. We can build our environment from atomic scales upwards developing new smart, responsive and communicative material constructs. "No longer are objects or processes the constituting elements of a building. Now they are described as technical networks of communicating nodes, which balance themselves in contrived patterns."
"Printable" solar cells are coated with a common ingredient used in toothpaste and suntan lotion and are able to produce electricity from direct sunlight as well as low-light and indoor lighting. They are manufactured with a process similar to inject printing.
These ideas of creating new materials from elemental levels has a longer history in science, but with the aid of digital computation we are seeing a wide range of rapid protoyping and CAD-CAM systems giving architects the ability to construct bespoke materials in relation to specific needs at low costs, quickly. One example of this change in design and manufacture of our built environment highlighted by Ludger, are printable solar cells. With current solar technology becoming financially benefical, and with print on demand, Ludger suggested that perhaps one day we could print onto virtually any other material, mixing previously unlike material combinations, to generate sustainable power supplies in the most unlikely of scenarios.
RepRap - Replicating Rapid-prototyper. A self-copying 3D printer using a process called fused deposition modeling
With the ability to rapidly create our environment as and when we need it, he suggested that "We are going towards the end of devices and instead the construction of devices by print processes." Unfortunately Ludger, ran out of time, and by the looks of things he was only getting started so he didn’t quite get to a full conclusion, but none the less gave a positive look into the near future of architectural practice and the freedom it will provide for artists, architects and designers to generate their own technology and suprising applications from microscopic up to the architectural scales.
Rogier van der Heide - Arup Lighting - Hyperreality in the urban context
Rogier began by giving a historical example of what he considers a mediafacade by showing the stained glass windows of Notredame Cathedral in Paris.
He discussed the question "Who are we building these facades for?" and talked about the process of design and manufacture of one of his best known pieces of work, as the lead designer for Arups on the Galleria facde in Seoul. The windowless Galleria West mall used to be a drab, understated presence in the Apgujeong-dong district, one of Seoul’s most exclusive shopping areas. The client, Hanwha Stores Co, wanted to turn it into a landmark building that would reflect the exclusive boutiques within its walls.
UN Studio and Arup Lighting were brought on board to recreate the mall’s exterior, with additional support from Arup’s structural engineers. Together they developed a chameleon-like facade that reflects the subtleties of natural light on opalescent, dichroic glass discs during the day. At night the discs are individually backlit and controlled by a computer program to create colour schemes all over the building - each disc acting like a big pixel on a screen.
Rogier van der Heide went through various stages of modelling the facade, begining with very simply with cardboard, fibre optics, gels, and colour filters, followed by more sophisticated technologies and analysis, plus input from fellow design team members. 4330 discs, each 850mm in diameter, make up the entire facade of the mall.
Dr. Gernot Tscherteu, mediafacade.net - a team approach to develop standardised media facade components.
Gernot explained that mediafacade.net was a research group, comprising of design consultancies and major architectural and manufacturing companies as well as research institutions. "The group’s main innovations arise from its simultaneous reformulation of all of the architectural, structural and electronic components required for next-generation media facades so that display and built structure merge functionally, technically and aesthetically." He began by making some observations that often the relationship between the building and contemporary media facades is quite seperate and that the challenge is to build closer connections between the building and its facade, "between the form of the building and its skin". His criticisms of much screen technology in urban settings, was that it covered up buildings, rather than intergrating into a more unified architecture. Using examples of the media facades that cover Times Square in New York he argued that co-operation between architects, and engineers should begin with the design of the lighting components themselves rather than architects using lighting technology "off the shelf".
"While there are now many examples of ambitious projects, significant issues of resolution, brightness, maintenance expenditure and invasiveness of display systems with the building spaces located behind them, still remain. In this last respect, especially, difficulties arise because most media facades are planned after the architectural concepts – and often much of the construction itself – have been completed. In contrast, mediafacade.net considers display systems to be an integral part of architecture and the construction of such display systems to require long-life building components and materials in the same way as glazing and HVAC installations."
One part I found paricularily interesting was in all the challenges faced in such development work. Gernot disected the issues faced when designing these schemes into 4 main parts. Im afraid that I didnt quite have time to complete my notes so apologies to Gernot but heres what I got.
Content/Format - viewing distances - resolution - narrative/symbolic - day/night
Display Tech - maintainance - cabling - energy - sun protection - structure
Urban Plan - traffic - light polution - neighbours - cultural heritage
Building - Users
After discussing some of these he ended his talk by presenting some current research on the development of aluminuium extrusions for combining structural strength and screen technologies into the buildings core framework. More information about their development of standardised media facade components can be found at www.mediafacade.net
Thomas Schwed - Mediafacades as integral part of architecture
The final speaker in the panel was Thomas Schwed who presented a series of projects he was involved in alongside examples of other artists, architects and designers operating at around the same which I thought was a very nice approach to looking at specific issues in his own work as well as more global issues in the design of mediafacdes. In particluar he spoke about his experiences developing a media skin for the 
T-Center (Vienna), an office building completed in 2004 and designed by architect Günther Domenig. In the end, due to urban planning restricting the facade to non-commercial imagery, the client of the architects eventually dropped the proposal due to financial issues.
Thomas’ discussion highlighted a re-occuring theme in how clients consider these technologies and the financial attraction of these kinds of systems weighed up against the aesthetic implications for content on such media facades. I personally liked the T-Center as it is, without a mediafacade but its often difficult to really assess looking at renders and animation how successful these kinds of proposal will be until the lights are turned on for real. Certainly there are examples where mediafacades have been benefical to architectural projects but in this case, we shall never know.
September 25th, 2007
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