Posts filed under 'Events'
Alan Worn – Discordant folly encountered at daybreak, at the foot of the mountain
‘Constructing Realities’ is the summer exhibition at Arup’s Phase 2 Gallery presenting some of the best of London’s young graduate architecture students work. It follows last years Digital Hinterlands exhibition which brought together masters student work from across London’s four leading architecture schools, the AA, the Bartlett, Westminster and RCA.
Justin Goodyre – A Prototype for an Adaptive Bloom
This years exhibition focuses on the best work from the new Postgraduate Certificate Course in Advanced Architectural Research, set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, to give students with Masters degrees the opportunity to take their work to a further stage development. The exhibition shows how some of the best Masters portfolios and theses contain the seeds of serious design research proposals, and how these might be taken forward to create new types of place, novel interactive building elements and new façade and structural systems.
Tetsuo Nagata – Monomyths
Architecture and engineering have a history where research and practice go hand in hand, where many great practices have grown as a result of fundamental research and where many research projects arise from groundbreaking design. This is especially true during periods of economic inactivity when recent modes of working are called into question and new modes (sometimes based on rediscovered historical precedent) are established. This can lead to the formation of innovative practices and to the start of academic careers in research and teaching.
Matt Shaw – Subverting the LiDAR landscape
Constructing Realities only shows the tip of the research iceberg these students have gone through turning dozens of drawings, experiments, physical and software prototypes into standalone pieces. Work presented includes a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set, site specific responsive installations investigating themes of digital participatory storytelling, virtual environments exploring maze and labyrinths as apposing models for spatial navigation, and laser scanning drawings exploiting the potential for error, mistruth, mistake and subversion within their production.
Vlad Tenu – Minimal Surfaces as Architectural Prototypes
The exhibition runs until the 1st October 2010
website
August 30th, 2010
I’m pleased to announce my new conference to be held in London in 2011.
FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.
Keynote Speakers (clockwise): Mark Burry, Matthias Kohler, Philip Beesley and Neri Oxman.
FABRICATE has emerged as the first in a series of focused events from the highly successful ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference and ‘Digital Hinterlands’ Exhibition in September 2009. Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in collaboration with The Building Centre London, this conference intends to frame discussion around the presentation of built or partially built works by individuals or collaborators in research, practice and industry selected from submissions through our Call for Works (deadline 10 September 2010).
Gramazio & Kohler’s R-O-B. Brick fabrication robot which will be exhibited alongside the conference
Representing the broad disciplinary spectrum from design to production, the presentation of built work will contribute alongside leading invited speakers from Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. A significant and supportive context for the event will be provided by London’s extensive network of global creative consultancies, many no more than a short stroll away from the venue.
We welcome original, innovative and pioneering projects for the Call for Works and we would also encouraged works in progress to enter too. Submission requirements emphasize strong and informative visual material with succinct analytical text and project synopsis. Selected conference submissions together with articles from keynote speakers will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press and launched at the conference.
August 10th, 2010
Reflexive Architecture Machines envisions architecture that is self-organizing, capable of transforming itself in response to changes in its environment or use. It re-imagines how we shape and assemble conventional materials, like rubber, plastic, and wood through a combination of material and computational processes to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of conventional building materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of environmental conditions like heat, moisture, air chemistry and gravity. This exhibition in the University of Buffalo Art Gallery presents faculty and student research in responsive materials conducted at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. It displays the products of the design lab, presented through drawings, models, tools, material studies and working prototypes that demonstrate the process by which projects are conceived, researched, and developed.
Projects on view include Allotropic Systems designed by Nicholas Bruscia, which uses flexible rubber molds to produce self-similar plastic casts. By reusing the same mold to produce one plastic sibling after another both plastic’s and rubber’s mutability is exploited to yield a considerable amount of formal variety.
Matthew T. Hume’s Warped offers experiments in plywood construction featuring a set of walls and arches composed from mechanically joined wood plys that change their shape in response to atmospheric moisture by twisting and bending between open and closed conditions. Omar Khan’s Gravity Screens and Open Columns explore the possibilities offered by elastomers for developing an organically kinetic architecture. They use the unique quality of this material to build collapsible and expandable structures that move similar to plants and respond to information gathered by electronic sensors. Omar Khan will also be talking at the Bartlett School of Architecture this coming Wednesday Evening. The lecture is free and open to the public. Details 6.30pm Wednesday 24 February 2010. Darwin Lecture Theatre, Darwin Building, Gower Street, London, WC1
February 20th, 2010
Coming up in London soon, the one-day conference explores new materials for architectural practice in the 21st century. International architects and scientists will explore the decision-making properties of matter and how this may be applied to create increasingly life-like buildings.
Organised by The Bartlett’s Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group, the conference aims to bring together architects and scientists who are working with new technologies that are capable of self-assembly and organization. Such technologies may form the basis for architecture generated by unconventional computing techniques which range from the actions of protocells, (entirely synthetic DNA-less agents), slime moulds (simple organisms with very complex behaviours), crystalline computing (using the organizing properties of molecules) and algae (that can be engineered to respond to environments in new ways). Neil Spiller founded the AVATAR Group in 2004, whose interdisciplinary research agenda explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain and considers the impact of advanced technology on architectural design, engaging with cybernetics, aesthetics, and philosophy to develop new ways of manipulating the built environment.
Speakers:
Neil Spiller (University College London)
Rachel Armstrong (University College London)
Evan Douglis (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Paul Preissner (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Lisa Iwamoto (University of California, Berkeley)
Philip Beesley (University of Waterloo)
Nic Clear (University College London)
Martin Hanczyc (University of Southern Denmark)
Ben de Lacy Costello (University of West England
Simon Park (University of Surrey)
Lee Cronin (University of Glasgow)
more information here
February 10th, 2010
I’ve just returned from California where I’ve installed Performative Ecologies at the Beall Center for Art + Technology for the Emergence Exhibition alongside the work of Marc Bohlen, Leo Nuñez, Karolina Sobecka and Jim George. Over a couple of posts I’m going to give a run down of the work on show but I recommend if your in the area to see it in the flesh. The exhibition opens to the public on the January 9th until May 7th 2010.
Curated by David Familian & Simon Penny, “this exhibition features international artists exploring both the biological and computational manifestations of emergent behavior arising from dynamically changing, interactive sculptures. We as human beings are created and create through a process of emergence. Whether these emergent forms originate organically or are man-made, they can illustrate to us the rich variety of mutating systems with all their variety and ability to adapt to a changing world.”
The Universal Whistling Machine, Marc Bohlen.
Marc Bohlen
Under the moniker REAL TECH SUPPORT, Marc Bohlen has been designing and building, over the past decade, information processing systems that critically reflect on information as a cultural value. He calls this “REAL TECH SUPPORT because technology, the dominant vector in the 21st century, cannot solve all the problems generated in its wake; its needs support. REAL TECH SUPPORT attempts to contribute to such a support system.”
Marc’s huge series of investigations over the past decade.
His work is informed by a long apprenticeship in the crafts (stone masonry), humanities (art history) and the engineering sciences (electrical engineering and robotics). The systems he designs are experiments and artworks found here and here and his texts are critical reflections on the works and the contexts they operate in.
The Universal Whistling Machine
Whistling is a communication primitive in most human languages. Whistling is a kind of time travel to a less articulated state. Inhabitants of Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, use a whistling language, el Silbo Gomera, to communicate from hilltop to hilltop. Their powerful whistles travel farther than the spoken word. We share whistling and song with many animals. Mammals and birds carry the means for whistling in them. Just as we carry physical remnants of our bodily evolution in us, we carry the capacity for whistling in us.
U.W.M (The Universal Whistling Machine) is an investigation into the vexing problem of human-machine interface design. Whistling is much closer to the phoneme-less signal primitives compatible with digital machinery than the messy domain of spoken language. As opposed to pushing machines into engaging humans in spoken language, U.W.M. suggests we meet on a middle ground. Whistling occurs across all languages and cultures. All people have the capacity to whistle, though many do not whistle well. Lacking phonemes, whistling is a pre-language language, a candidate for a limited Esperanto of human-machine communication. Beyond alternatives to computer interfaces, U.W.M. also offers the potential for a new approach to human-animal communication. U.W.M. is capable of imitating certain bird whistles as easily as it can synthesize human whistles. Could this lead to new forms of human-machine-animal exchanges?
December 21st, 2009
Last week the V&A in London opened a new show titled Decode – Digital Design Sensations. The exhibition, co-curated by onedotzero, showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations.
Exhibition poster: Prototypes from the Flowers series, 2009 Daniel Brown
I was lucky enough to get my hands on a ticket to the opening and whilst not everything in the show was my kettle of fish, a few works really stood out. I’ll focus on those.
Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror installation was one of the highlights for me. Ok- I’ve seen about a million pictures of it (check out Troika’s Digital by Design book, for instance) but I’d never seen it in person. Beautifully done- the work had a really organic feeling to it despite the somewhat complex network of electronics carefully integrated into the back. If there was one ‘I put my hand up, you show me putting my hand up’ installation I’d want in my house, it’d be this one.
http://www.smoothware.com/danny/
Equally worthy of mention was Troika’s Digital Zoetrope, originally commissioned for onedotzero’s 2008/09 festival. From Troika’s website:
“The idea for the zoetrope comes directly from the festivals ‘adventures in motion’ payoff and this year’s theme ‘Citystates’.”
“We wanted to create a container that both celebrated the heritage of motion arts as well as its digital present while affording us a very literal medium for the content – the idea of altered states through motion.”
http://troika.uk.com/
At the slightly more aggressive end of the scale, Ryoji Ikeda’s piece in the show was probably my favourite. Ok. Equal favourite. I saw him Live at the Paradiso in Amsterdam a couple of years ago and whilst I must say that I can generally handle experimental music, this really tested me. The set was about half an hour long and after 20 minutes I was unsure if I was going to make it to the end. I loved every second of it, but it was so intense.
He describes his work at the V&A, data.scan, as an attempt to materialise the vast quantities of data surrounding us in our everyday lives. It is part of Ikeda’s ongoing datamatics series, a collection of works that investigate the minutiae and infinite qualities of data.
For the sound element of the work, Ryoji opts for high frequencies which cut through even the chaos of the opening night, in a room which was probably already a little over-crowded with works before it was filled with people.
http://www.ryojiikeda.com/
Decode is on now at the V&A and runs through to April 11, 2010. I’ll definately be back to check it out one more time. I’m curious what Jason Bruges created in the garden. On the night of the opening they closed if off before I made it out there.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/Decode/index.html
December 17th, 2009
Previous Posts