SCI-Arc presents, Quasar, a new site-specific installation by the LA/NY-based design/media firm slap!, founded by architect Jean-Michel Crettaz, and produced in collaboration with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “Quasar is an immersive light and sound space made from prototype membranes realized as an interactive light/sound object and comprised of a dense array of interlinked elements describing an intricate three-dimensional structure.”
The exhibition draws on slap!’s continued interest in developing an awareness of the interconnectedness of space and material, with a goal of extending established notions of volume and scale. The gallery is fitted with sensors that draw real-time data from the installation and the people within the exhibition, which is then synchronized with streamed real-time data of solar activity and nuclear processes provided by SLAC and NASA. This information is then fed back into the object through layers of LED strands, re-visualizing the space in order to create an dynamic spatial experience.
The word “quasar” is a contraction of the term quasi-stellar-radio-source, used historically by astronomers to describe entirely unknown cosmological objects. Today, it is believed that quasars are the most distant, and yet still detectable, objects in the universe. Giving off enormous amounts of energy produced from massive black holes in the center of their own galaxies, quasars are intensely bright; their emitted light drowning out all other stars in the same galaxy.
“Quasar is an artificial counterpart hovering in response to the currents and activities of the visitors, and in doing so, stretches and collapses the horizons of the known. The possibilities of interrelated synthetic and natural processes begin to define new emergent ecologies. quasar questions the boundaries of scale and the psyche, offering immersion into a vastly expanded space which renders perception permeable, and in the end, disperses identity.”
Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the UK in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movement sensors to react to the behaviour of the visitors. It was one of the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.
Alex Zivanovic, a Visiting Scholar at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, has been researching the work of Edward Ihnatowicz and building an excellent archive which is available online. I am so pleased that Alex is taking the time to research thoroughly how Ihnatowicz not just built the Senster but developed its behaviours. It was a truely ground breaking piece of work that is still a source of inspiration for artists and roboticists today.
Ihnatowicz’s interest in the kinetics stemmed from his conviction that the behaviour of something tells us far more about it than its appearance. This led him to build the Senster, one of the most influential kinetic sculptures ever made. It consisted of a fifteen-foot-long steel frame articulated in six different places, with the joints all powered by hydraulics. On the Senster’s ‘head’ were an array of microphones and a Doppler radar system.
The Honeywell mini-computer controlling the mechanism was programmed to make it react to three things: moderate and low sounds, loud sounds, and fast motion. Moderate sounds the head would move towards, loud sounds it would pull back from, and fast motion it would track. The result was an uncanny resemblance to a living thing, and the crowds at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, Holland, where it was on show reacted with enormous excitement. Children would shout and wave at it, call it names, and even throw things. Ihnatowicz explains that its movements seemed to stem from situations that people recognized.
In the quiet of the early morning the machine would be found with its head down, listening to the faint noise of its own hydraulic pumps. Then if a girl walked by the head would follow her, looking at her legs. Ihnatowicz described his own first stomach-turning experience of the machine when he had just got it working: he unconsciously cleared his throat, and the head came right up to him as if to ask, ‘Are you all right?’ He also noticed a curious aspect of the effect the Senster had on people. When he was testing it he gave it various random patterns of motion to go through.
Children who saw it operating in this mode found it very frightening, but no one was ever frightened when it was working in the museum with its proper software, responding to sounds and movement. Although the Senster was dismantled some years ago, many people who saw it still remember vividly what a strong impression it made on them. Edward Ihnatowicz died in 1988. Alex Zivanovic currently continues to build on the archive as well as running science and technology education events and his own firm AZ Consultants, supporting the development of mechatronics projects for medical and industrial applications.
Here’s one of Augmented Architecture‘s prototypes that I saw at the ACADIA07 earlier this year. “Life Spectulatrix” is an evolutionary physical skin based on digital environmental feedback retrieved through the webspace. Architect Nancy Diniz describes how it becomes a “universally situated living piece” through its own evolutionary behaviour in relation to global environmental information as well as local interaction.
“Augemented Architectures” is : Nancy Diniz, a licensed architect and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett and a tutor at the Department of Architecture at ISCTE in Lisbon and Cesar Branco, a computer science engineer working for VSNL as a Solutions Architect based in London, UK.
One project that caught my eye from Regine’s posts covering the VIDA awards was David Rokeby’s Cloud Installation currently suspended in the Great Hall at the Ontario Science Centre. One hundred identical sculptural elements, arranged in ten by ten grid, are rotated at slightly differing speeds by computer-controlled motors. The elements slowly shift in and out of synchronization. When the motors are just out of sync, huge waves ripple across the space. When completely in sync, the work appears almost solid then suddenly almost invisible. When far out of sync, the sculptural elements float in apparent chaos. Cloud creates constantly shifting fields and patterns in the space of the Great Hall, playing with the tension between chaos and order, between scientific theory and human experience, and between objectivity and subjectivity.
Cloud is large arrangement of identical simple elements. The smallest elements of the work are a pair of thin acrylic planes crossing each other perpendicularly on their short side. One is clear, the other is a light blue grey. Six sets of these planes are arranged in identical orientation along an acrylic shaft. A stepper motor slowly rotates each shaft. 100 of these motor shaft sets are set up in a 10 x 10 configuration to create an open form. The 100 units are identical, replaceable and interchangeable. They are attached to a 10 x 10 grid of aluminum. All motors are connected to a computer which maintains the desired relationship of rotations speeds and positions.
There are three distinct states of organization of this structure. When all rotations are identical, the structure resembles a solid, both subjectively and formally. As the rotations shift away from this solid state, the structure melts into a liquid-like flow, with waves clearly traversing the structure. Beyond a certain point, the relationships between the rotations becomes unclear and the structure resembles the random incoherence of a gas. The transitions between identifiable states reflect the transitions of melting, freezing, evaporating, condensing and sublimating.
The test of any good installation is how children respond and few I’ve seen get this kind of intuitive response. Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille, made ‘Funky Forest‘ which premiered at the 2007 Cinekid festival in the Netherlands. ‘Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.
Funcky Forest was made with openFrameworks which Theo is involved in developing.
Evoke by Architect & Artist Usman Haque is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, that lights up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to "evoke" colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.
The cathedral, built to link conceptually earth to the heavens, has been a site for the conveyance of words, dreams and aspirations for hundreds of years. The facade is designed to orient the gazes of passers-by upwards. As an attempt to continue this tradition, the patterns of Evoke are generated in realtime by the words, sounds, music and noises produced collectively by the public, determined by their particular voice characteristics. The colours will skim the surface of the Minster, pour round its features and crevasses, emerging finally near the top of the facade where they will sparkle high overhead.
People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building – a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.
