Congratulations to Usman Haque and his team on the second successful flight of his ‘Burble‘ project. Here are a few photos of the event which was held in london over the weekend.
Thanks to Joe for the Photos
2 comments September 19th, 2007
Philip Beesley - Implant Matrix
In a couple of weeks, I’m flying of to this years ACADIA Conference held in Nova Scotia, Canada where I will be presenting my recent installation Performative Ecologies as well as taking part in the Metabolic Network sensory workshop which looks like its going to be really interesting. The workshop will accommodate up to 25 participants who are interested in some of the following areas: concept of interactivity, modeling of dynamic systems, software craft, sensors and actuators, fabrication and textile arts. Details of the workshop can be found below and if that sounds of interest to you contact Acadia07workshops@dal.ca
SeaUnSea - Mette Ramsgard Thomsen In collaboration with dance choreographer Carol Brown
Metabolism, in living systems, has two aspects: anabolism (which means building up), and catabolism (or breaking down). These processes, part of all living systems, carry a particular resonance with respect to present-day concerns about sustainable environments. This two-day workshop, on the theme of “Metabolic Network”, brings together five researchers working in the area of electronic sensing in art and design, with a special focus on textiles and architectural-scale applications. The network will be a large installation made from a field of suspended fibers that have different properties: such as elasticity, conductivity, dissolvability, or luminosity. By joining the fibers together, a field of possibilities open up and patterns within the field emerge. The use of sensors and actuators, both electronic and mechanical, will provide dynamic and responsive features in the network. The result will be a metabolic network that emerges, acts and self-destructs over the course of the two-day period.
Loop.pH Sonumbra
The metabolic network will serve as a playground to explore the potentials of sensors and actuators hooked up to a responsive architecture. It will serve as the common medium for the work of the five invited researchers, each expert in some aspect of electronic sensing, textile design or architectural form-making.
1 comment September 17th, 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.
Add comment September 14th, 2007
Commissioned for the Art Center presentation of “Open House,” House Swarming is a site-specific installation that operates as both a complex light pattern that greets visitors and as an environment-sensing device. During the day, the “swarm” of green ambiguous forms, both biomorphic and geometric, accentuates the South Campus’s main entry. At twilight, the swarm comes to life, telling visitors and passersby about the current air quality around the building. Electronic sensors perceive air contaminants – such as tobacco, benzene, carbon monoxide, even perfume – and separately inform the outside and inside swarms, which sets off signals. These signals are interpreted as changes to the natural rhythm that the network has established based on the number and distribution of nodes connected to the cable net. Flashing cells on the exterior faÁade indicate air quality inside the building. Conversely, pulsating effects in the interior entry inform visitors about the outside air quality. The flashing lights become indicators of the environment like dramatic clouds at sunset that forewarnings of storms at night.
HouseSwarming is an example of how architects and designers are using technology that mimics biological systems. These patterns look like those structures found in nature, such as the patterns made by schools of fish, flocks of birds, and swarms of locusts. Used in the home, this type of sensor-node technology could enable us to extend our nervous system into the environment and alter our sense of boundaries. Designed by Jenna Didier, Oliver Hess and Marcos Lutyens of Infranatural
1 comment September 7th, 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.
6 comments July 20th, 2007
Dune 4.0 by Daan Roosegaarde is an interactive landscape which physically changes its appearance in accordance to human presence. Placed in the main corridor of Montevideo, Dune 4.0 is composed of hundreds of fibers which react in correspondence to the movements and sounds of the visitors. Daan described this as a "hybrid of nature and technology " which "functions as a platform on which the relationship between visitor and the existing architecture is enhanced. By means of looking, walking and interacting, visitor and space merge into one coherent environment which could be best interpreted as a kind of Alice in Technoland”.
Dune 4.0 is part of a series interactive installations I make called ‘Liquid constructions’. There is Liquid Space, 4D-Pixel, Liquid 2.0, Wind 3.0, Dune 4.0 and for the U3 Triennale in Slovenia his is building Flow 5.0. Check out Regine’s recent interview with Daan about Dune 4.0 on wmmna.
2 comments January 5th, 2007
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