‘Beacon’, by Chris O’Shea & Cinimod Studio is a kinetic light installation with a mind of its own. An array of emergency beacon lights interacts with visitors, tracking their movement through the space, creating an immersive and playful experience.
The installation exploits a transfer of technologies from existing industrial products. The beacon lights have had their internal parts replaced with custom hardware, enabling the rotation of the reflector and lamp brightness to be individually controlled. Thermal imaging cameras have been adapted to track the participants’ movement through the space.
‘Beacon’ is orchestrated in real-time by a bespoke control system, which uses tracking information from the cameras to coordinate an interactive and highly responsive behavior.
One of the special mentions in the VIDA 11.0 exhibition went to Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots project by James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Alex Zivanovic, and Trevor Harvey currently exists as a series of five semi-operational prototypes: Mousetrap coffee table robot, Lampshade robot, Cobweb robot, UV fly killer parasite robot, and Flypaper robotic clock . The robots take the form of beautiful and fashionable furniture and household accessories, which perform functions that range from lighting a room to low-key (and admittedly dark) entertainment. But more primarily, the very process that allows the robots to run by supplying them with power also has the function of ridding the household of pests. Each robot has a microbial fuel cell that converts organic matter, ensnared by the robot, into electrical energy: a mechanized iris built into the top of a table traps mice, a lampshade has holes that allow insects in but not out, a small robotic armature picks flies from cobwebs that spiders build into it.
Mousetrap coffee table robot
The key design metaphor in use here is at once that of a novel energetic recyling machine, and a somewhat cruel spectacle of entrapment that mimics the sophistication of predatorial plants and insects. Although there is a strong element of irony in the project, it nonetheless seems only fitting that our relationships with domestic robots should incorporate some of the darker features that characterize relationships in nature.
Interactive Architecture has been quiet for the past 6 months mainly due to taking on a new teaching position at the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Adaptive Architecture and Computation Masters. More about this in the near future but for now all I’ll say is that my plan is to get blogging back into my weekly routine so if anyone has any interesting suggestions for new articles please let me know.
Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide Urban Screens events. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place 3.-8. October at Federation Square, Melbourne.
There are 2 calls for the event which can be found here
A simple concept but i think quite engaging, “Glow Positioning System“, an installation by Ashok Sukumaran, installed in Bombay in 2005 enables the occupants of the central space of the site to use a hand-crank to “scroll” the surrounding architecture using light. “Lights patterns travel between buildings, across roads and onto trees and lamp posts, forming an image-scape that is starkly visible at night.”
“It allows the physical length of the view to become a chronological one- to be viewed at a speed determined by the user. The ring responds to panoramic desire, the age-old search for an image to immerse our selves in. From Cycloramas to VR (via panoramic traditions in painting and photography), the “surround view ” is a familiar presence in both urban and cinematic manifestoes. Of course, here the city surrounds us already. We just connect some dots, and look again.”
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.”
