Performative Ecologies – Ruairi Glynn
July 20th, 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.
Entry Filed under: Devices,Interactive,Kinetic,Lighting,Scuplture/Installation
6 Comments Add your own
1. tim | July 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am
“it is fundamentally about giving our architecture the ability to enter into dialog with us”
Although on a completely different timescale, this makes me think about Stewart Brand’s “How buildings learn” when he talks about the layered evolution of buildings in response to their environment.
He also has an interesting talk on the Long Now website.
2. fred | July 25th, 2007 at 9:59 am
raa raa i didnt know you were from accross the pond – its centre not center
3. Varun M. Ajani | July 28th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Well…Hi. I enjoyed reading your blog, and would like to invite you to write for Architecture-Page.
Get in touch if this interests you.
mailto: collaborations [..a.t..] architecture-page [..d.o.t..] com
Varun M Ajani
Editor
http://www.architecture-page.com
4. Great Dance Weblog&hellip | August 2nd, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Adaptive Architectural Objects Perform Unique Choreography…
Ruairi Glynn of Interactive Architecture blog writes about his latest project “Performative Ecologies” – his post and his project page. In a nutshell, he has created adaptive objects with a light source and a twirling arm. Here are two pictures:……
5. erik sjodin . net&hellip | August 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Interactive or Reactive?…
Interactive is a popular word these days, especially within new media art. But what does it really mean? In its broadest sense any artifact that can be influenced by a user is interactive. But if the term is used in this sense then it doesn’t nec…
6. erik | August 21st, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I recently had the “what is interactivity?” discussion with a friend. We didn’t come up with a good answer but we both agreed that “reactive” or “responsive” in many cases better describes what people refer to as interactive. At least in the context of new media art… It’s an interesting discussion, I’m looking forward to more posts on this topic.
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