Posts filed under 'Devices'
My recent work has been influenced a great deal by the work of Cybernetican Gordon Pask (1928-1996) from his interactive installations to his work with Architects Cedric Price, John Fazer and Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte. Its always interesting to see how Pask’s work continues to inspire a range of contemporary art work so I was inteersted to find out from Network Performance about Roots (2005-06) by Roman Kirschner. Roots is a world with a fluid atmosphere in a glass tank. Dark crystals grow trying to make connections. Constellations develop. They generate sound. And after some time they dissolve into clouds.The installation is based on the model of a chemical computers devloped by Pask.
Electricity is pulsed through the whole Sculpture. It is the key to the constant transformation. Growth changes the flow of the current. The modified flow changes the growth. Software and Hardware leave the next step to the material. The voltages at each wire are put through a resonance filter and thus transformed into sound. The 4/4 pulse results in a sublime rhythm. Movie of Roots (QT 10,73MB) This piece will be presented as part of Nature [of Man] exhibition.
October 22nd, 2007
Performative Ecologies Film 15Mb
Development of Performative Ecologies Film 25Mb
Website
Well here’s whats been keeping me busy these past months. I got the opportunity to share my most recent collection of responsive environments, collectively called "Performative Ecologies" at the We Love Technology conference a couple of days ago and now I’ve finally found the time to distill a considerable amount of ideas and speculative installations into something manageable to read along with a short film about the culmination of the work as well as a longer film about the development of the project.
Some of the questions at the center of my work are: Fundamentally, what is interactivity? How can we build environments that are interactive as apposed to reactive? What does an interactive architecture offer us over a reactive architecture? What does interactive architecture offer us over the lifetime of the buildings and wider landscape we inhabit? These questions go back much further than this particular project, and in fact, were the reason I started this blog in the first place.
If I was to try and sum it up in a sentence, it is fundamentally about giving our architecture the ability to enter into dialog with us, rather than simply respond with fixed behaviours to fixed commands from us, to learm from its experiences and adapt its behaviours, to suggest new spatial configurations and see how we respond. Very often I find that so called ‘interactive environments’ rarely enable the architecture to negotiate its behaviours , but rather follow pre-choreographed routines when triggered. More broadly, a great deal of misuse of the term ‘interactive’ is common in art, design and architectural discourse and I believe that this has diluted its true meaning and huge potential. My description of “Performative Ecologies” should reveal some of the ideas I’ve developed, and present where I think the most interesting possibilities exist. Please let me know what you think.
Full description of Project
July 20th, 2007
Another project from the very clever fellows at MITs Tangible Media group. Senspectra is a computationally augmented physical modeling toolkit designed for sensing and visualization of structural strain. The system functions as a distributed sensor network consisting of nodes, embedded with computational capabilities and a full spectrum LED, which communicate to neighbor nodes to determine a network topology through a system of flexible joints. While the Senspectra infrastructure provides a flexible modular sensor network platform, its primary application derives from the need to couple physical modeling techniques utilized in the architecture and industrial design disciplines with systems for structural engineering analysis, offering an intuitive approach for physical real-time finite element analysis. Utilizing direct manipulation augmented with visual feedback, the system gives users valuable insights on the global behavior of a constructed system defined as a network of discrete elements.
December 6th, 2006
I haven’t been posting much in the last 3 weeks because of my current project. There’s a long way to go but I thought I’d put a little image of the 2nd prototype online and some images of it in action. I’ll have to set up a project blog soon to start documenting it. These are only small prototypes to explore potential behaviors and gestures my work could perform. The 3rd Prototype is currently getting built and should be able to not just draw but also observe Prototype 2′s drawings as gestures and maybe even messages.
Obviously the work of Conrad Shawcross has some aesthetic comparisons and so too the photography of Gjon Mili (see below) but the intentions of my work are quite different. Within an architectural context I am using robotics and spatial light drawings to explore ideas of architectures potential to communicate, respond and perform for its inhabitants. I’m simultaniously working on methods of live interactive notation techniques implanted into traditional plan and section projections to explore the idea of turning the traditional architectural drawing into an interactive interface to choreograph my architectural perfomers.
While ideas of using light to draw are almost as old as photography itself. Artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and the Lucio Fontana explored these ideas in the mid-20th Century. Recent developments in computation have led to new work such of Swedish design firm Front’s 3D tracking and rapid prototyping project, Karl Willis’ Light Tracer and PIPS:lab’s Luma2solator and graf. There are also a number of recent music videos and experimental films using this techniques such pikapika‘s light animations.
November 30th, 2006
See Video
In an effort to handle its nighttime public urination problem, cities are considering installing urinals that disappear below street level during the day. Unlike the automated, self-cleaning toilets planned for Toronto and Vancouver, which are enclosed booths with doors that that automatically open after a set time period, the Urilift system is a two-meter high stainless steel cylinder with three alcoves, each with a urinal, and no doors By day, the Urilift is lowered below street level for a nice clean look. Then at night, an operator comes by with a remote and the Urilift hydraulically lifts to sidewalk level in about two minutes. Full Article via Slashdot
November 20th, 2006
Only a couple of posts ago I showed the novel uses of Electroluminescence in electrical cabling to create awareness of power use but perhaps soon the transfer of energy will become entirely invisible. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players wirelessly. The team of physicists have investigated "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied as a method of transferring energy to a wide range of devices. Instead of using acoustic vibrations, the team’s system exploits the resonance of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic radiation includes rad waves, infrared and X-rays. Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space. To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances". When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. "Tails" of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface. "If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,"… read full article
November 15th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts