Posts filed under 'Kinetic'
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
In search of flexible buildings - Kengo Kuma uses the term “weak architecture”. His teahouse does not rise up from the ground as a fixed wooden construction, but unfolds as an airborne ephemeral structure. When a ventilation system is activated, the teahouse swells into shape like a white textile blossom. In its interior, comprising a surface of approximately twenty square metres, are nine tatami mats, an electric stove for the water kettle, and a preparation room.
Integrated LED technology allows the use of the teahouse at night; the interior can be heated by way of the membrane. The Teehouse of Kengo Kuma is situated in the garden of Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt.
via luminapolis
October 9th, 2007
At the Tate last saturday Jason Bruges Studio talked about a number of their recent projects including this one called ‘wind to light’ which you may have seen featured in the press earlier in the summer, Jason described how it was created to inspire people to think creatively about the spaces that surround them and explore the sustainable alternatives to developing our built environment.
‘Wind to light’ is a custom built, site-specific installation consisting of 500 miniature wind turbines directly generating the power to illuminate hundreds of integrally mounted LEDs (light-emitting diodes). the effect is to create ‘firefly-like fields of light’ where the wind can be visualized as an ephemeral electronic cloud in the atmosphere. the turbine and LED modules are attached to their base by flexible poles which allow them to slightly sway in the wind, animating the movement of the wind by a digital, electronic means.
The self-powered, autonomous installation illustrates the simplicity and directness of wind power and its potential, literally and symbolically closing the gap between power generation and consumption. wind to light presents wind power in a visually tangible way and one that is characterised primarily by its resultant output rather than process. it eloquently illustrates the silent power of wind. Wind to light presents the perspective that wind power can be an attractive or even potentially beautiful addition to the landscape, contrary to many widespread opinions that wind turbines are a man-made, visual and physical intrusion upon scenery and its natural beauty.
The relocation of wind power from the rural environment to urban surroundings literally brings it closer to us and suggests that as our requirements from wind power have evolved since the use of windmills so should our attitudes towards its application and location. perhaps wind turbines are more suited within the man made environment than nature where they are alien and their need is divorced from them.
September 16th, 2007
Its been a busy past week in London with events at the Tate and the very interesting 2 day conference on Media Architecture held at Central Saint Martins. I”ll cover these in detail over the coming days. Meanwhile, on Sunday I managed to catch up with Daan Roosegaarde for a few drinks and talk about his most recent interactive installations including Flow 5.0 (pictured above). Daan describes Flow as "An interactive sculpture made out of hundreds of ventilators which are reacting to your sound and motion. By walking and interacting an illusive landscape of transparancies and ‘artificial wind’ is created. Moving through Flow 5.0 the visitor becomes conscious of himself as a body, in a dynamic relation with space and technology. Currently Flow 5.0 is further developed as a large architectural intervention commissioned by TodaysArt.”
What I find interesting about Daan’s approach is that his installations are not simply built and shipped off to various exibitions so that everyone sees the same work. Instead, he is continually developing his existing installations adapting the software and materials to new contexts, and strategies of interaction. He’s also open about how his work is very much a team effort with the support of programmers, engineers and production assistants who are all given the freedom to push their interests within the work which he conceives of, and creatively directs. I look forward to seeing what Flow 6.0 looks like soon.
September 14th, 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
David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of ‘The Living’ Architects presented their recent work at the Interactive Architecture event I organised at Eyebeam last month. They have just released 2 lovely little books called ‘Life Size‘ 1 & 2 which explore the possibility of creating open source design processes. The first volume of Life Size includes ‘DIY directions for making a responsive kinetic system, an energy self-sufficient display, and a collapsible framing structure out of weak materials.’ & the second volume of this series includes essays by Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Livia Corona, Holly Kretschmar, Seth Mnookin, William Wu and SISYPHUS.
Whats most interesting for me about David and Soo-ins work is their methodology they call "flash research," which they define as an architectural research project with a budget under $1000 and a ninety-day timeline, expected to result in a fully functioning, 1:1 scale prototype. To me this seems a challenging approach that forces you to consider low tech solutions rather than spending a fortune on answering problems often with unsustainable answers.
When interviewed by Metropolis Magazine David discussed how each Flash Research project is driven by a specific query. “The initial question for Living Glass was: What if architecture responded to you?” Benjamin says. “ We asked, What if good architecture and bottom-line development were the same thing?” Rather than simply creating computer models, they decided that to prove their solution they would need to test it, down to the exact thickness of the plywood or joint necessary for a design to be successful.
David and Soo-in run a graduate class at Columbia Architecture school where with their students, they continue to experiment with these ideas of rapid experimentation often in the context of responsive & kinetic spatial design. Check out their website where you can find out more about their projects such as living River Glow, a network of pods that act as an interface between the water quality of the river and local inhabitants awareness of environmental conditions and Living Glass, a silent transforming and transparent surface that responds to inhabitants proximity.
Also check out his video interview with David and Soo-in
February 28th, 2007
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