Declan Shaw’s of Interactive Installation, Bird Soundscapes incorporate a dynamic three dimensional acoustic environment of birdsong which perform accelerated diurnal cycles. Individual ‘birds’ occupy positions in space, which move about in birdlike patterns and also reacting to the movement of the inhabitants. This is accompanied by a coloured light cycle which denotes the times of day.
In this manner the listener may hear an accumulating dawn chorus of bird personalities while her environment is filled with an intensifying morning blue light. She may go on the hear crows and blackbirds interacting in a red evening dusk. Shaws work was developed within the Bartlett School of Architectures Anechoic Chamber hence the menacing image of the spikey walls but the intention is that the constructed environment would be placed within an existing negative waiting space, such as a hospital ward or waiting room, with a view to encouraging positive waiting behaviour in its occupants.
As well as the installation Declan produced a series of college images depicting this changing acoustic environments intended effects in the hospital patients experience of these spaces.
Declan describes how “the context of this project is the construction of a space for waiting and for exploiting the possibilities of waiting. While drawing distinctions between waiting situations as pleasure/play and waiting as punishment/pain, I fixed on the notion of reverie as a crucial condition for the encouragement of the positive possibilities of waiting, which include: rest, renewal, inspired creativity and a sense of satisfaction and wellbeing.” Declans doesn’t have a website but his work and work of many other students from Unit 14 at the Bartlett can be found here
The Royal College of Art Show opened last week with some excellent work which no doubt wmmna will cover in depth. One project I particularly enjoyed was Tom Foulsham, an ex-Bartlett graduate and now graduate of the RCA’s Design Products programme.
In some ways Tom’s work could be compared to Heath Robinson’s imagined machines and certainly he has that mad inventor spirit, but underneath this is a sensitivity that should not be underestimated. His intricate machines are both playful and though provoking.
They are beautifully balanced and responsive objects that play with the forces of nature as well as the forces of information. His work and very much more great work is on display at the RCA this week.
I first saw Jimenez Lai’s work when it was presented at Materials & Applications in LA. Finally he’s put together a website so I thought I’d cover 2 recent pieces of his work. Jimenez describes his work as an exploration of “hypothetical scenarios of experimental architecture. By pressing alternate conditions against our context, the projects aim at interrogating different points of views and broaden the ways we engage conventions. Graphic novels and physical installations are the two primary weapons of choice, and we believe representation is more than half the battle. The drawings often explore storylines of architecture and urbanism that dramatize exaggerated realities. The projects swerve back into the physical world via the interactive installations derived from the stories. These installations are attempts to better understand the spatial implications of the two-dimensional fiction.”
Phalanstery Module
This installation grown from the hypothesizes that in zero-gravity, one can rotate (in) architecture and treat all elevations as plans – i.e., walls, ceilings and floors. Without gravity, all surfaces can be occupied. In essence, the distinctions between orthographic drawings become obsolete. To this end the installation will be a large constantly rotating structure which visitors will be able to approach and use differently every time.
The installation is inspired by a comic book Lai created to assert commentaries regarding the Broadacre City– a 1932 Frank Lloyd Wright vision of a Utopian city where each family own a one-acre agrarian plot and commutes by private automobile. Wright never really took into account that space and natural resources are limited. We are witnessing such an impact today. Wealthier citizens have fled cities for sprawling suburban sub-divisions.
Downtown cores are left to the poor, and cities are becoming increasingly ineffective in controlling energy consumption. Lai takes Broadacre City to outer space. Flipping it on its side and making it an Ark are ways he signifies that resources are finite. It is a world where every man (gets) a dwelling unit and every man (gets) a pointlessly boring job… until the citizen dies.”
Point Clouds
This project uses a set of standard modules and simple geometric rules to compose a system. The com- plexity Lies within the softness of the connection points.
When force is applied to one rotary joint, the entire structure will respond with further geometrical transformations. Softness allows the piece to be interactive, as visitors can converse with the impermanence of its form. Affordances, as defined by psychologist James J. Gibson, embody all action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them.
Dimensions, in this case, has various meanings in the many ways our bodies may instinctively inform actions such as lean, sit, grab, skip or pull. Any storyline of the above appropriations will have a physical morphology in the diagram. Self-illuminating pigments are applied to the control points to highlight its topology at night. This project engages the limits of the body as abstractions of architectural programs and their relationships to the formal resolutions.
I just got back from Lisbon where I saw, amongst other things, the Gulbenkian Museum. Ok… it has very little to do with interactive architecture, but I was so inspired by it that I decided to write about it anyway.
The thing that really struck me walking through the museum was the balance throughout. I don’t mean in a the-building-is-almost-falling-down-but-not kinda way: I’m referring to an unusually great combination of art and architecture, and how it felt.
The museum building was designed by a team made up of the architects Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa and hints (rather strongly) at inspiration from Mies van der Rohe. The building’s minimalist concrete form sits in a beautifully landscaped park, concealing bunker-like yet welcoming rooms of marble and wood floors and ceilings. Blinds obscuring the view to outside through floor to ceiling windows reduce the outside image almost to paintings.
Inside, one of the most amazing art collections I’ve ever seen is actually given the space it deserves. The minimalist architecture is the perfect backdrop for an intricately crafted collection which includes everything from Egyptian treasures to Chinese and Japanese tapestries and ceramics, to Rembrants, Rubens’, and Monets. I’m not an art historian, by any stretch of the imagination, but clearly only the best was good enough for this collector.
That one man managed to gather this collection is unbelievable. That it has all ended up together in this setting is even more amazing. In a time when I’m thinking more and more about interactive and reactive installations, and the opportunities an increasing number of permanent commissions will bring, 2 hours walking through the Gulbenkian has reminded me in the significance of balance. Although completely static, save the variation of the small amount of natural light entering the museum, I would dare describe the resulting feeling of being in this museum as immersive. The combination of light, minimal architecture, a subtle connection to the surrounding landscape and an extremely detailed collection of artworks, drew everyone in a way I’ve rarely experienced. I could go on about this forever but I won’t – I guess I just look forward to seeing more and more interactive installations that find this balance too.
Another great project by LAb[au], “fLUX binary waves” is an urban and cybernetic installation based on the measuring of infrastructural ( passengers, cars…) and communicational ( electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio…) flows and their transposition into luminous, sonic and kinetic rules.
This relation between the installation and the urban activity happens in real time and sets each person as an element of the installation, as a centre of the public realm. The installation fLUX, binary waves is constituted by a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall.
The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the 32 panels.
The microprocessors are connected to infrared sensors, capturing the surrounding infrastructural flows, defining the frequency and amplitude of the rotation. According to this set up, each impulse is transmitted from one panel to the other, describing visual waves running from one side of the installation to the other, and then bouncing back while progressively loosing oscillation. All these principles relate the ‘micro-events’ happening in the area to a unified play of light, colours and sounds directly derived from the rhythm of the city flows.
As such, the installation proposes an urban sign having as subject the ‘urban’ and as message to be a catalyst of urbanity via the transcription of urban flows in a contemporary play of kinetics, lights and sound.
Materials & Applications is a research center that I’ve written about a couple of times because of the wonderful large scale installations that are built there every year. It is a residential space “dedicated to pushing new and underused ideas for art, landscape and architecture into view.”
Above and below is a recent installation Density Fields an “extreme cantilever” built from aluminum and polypropylene rope hung over the courtyard between October 2007 – March 2008. Defying classification as either sculpture or architecture, the piece flexed with a gesture that extends imaginary lines of force beyond the small courtyard, seeming to pierce buildings and the neighborhood.
I just found a little video by Cool Hunting that takes a closer look at the works that have been shown there, from the golden vortex of Maximillian’s Schell to “Bubbles,”by Foxlin (Michael Fox and Juintow Lin), NONDesigns (Miao Miao and Scott Franklin) and Brand Name Label (Gabriel Renz) with Axel Kilian, Darius Miller, and numerous talented volunteers.
Sitting down with Materials & Applications founder Jenna Didier and technical director Oliver Hess, the short video shows the story behind their innovative space for experimental architecture.
