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Insect Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:26:17 GMT

The Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles. via spatialrobot

The Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles. via spatialrobot

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Urban Screens 08

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:10:54 GMT

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.

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

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There are 2 calls for the event which can be found here

Adaptive Evolutionary Robotics

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:11:29 GMT

Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve. via the very interesting spatialrobots

Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves andself-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve. via the very interesting spatialrobots

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Glow Positioning System - Ashok Sukumaran

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:40:57 GMT

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.”

See Film here

 

“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.”

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-…

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Arthur Ganson

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:01:44 GMT

Arthur Ganson has been a great inspiration to me. His artistic and engineering skill is articulated with great humour and weightlessness. I just thought I’d put a few videos I found online up here but I recommend the DVD if you really want to see the detail in his work.

 

Self-described as a cross between a mechanical engineer and a choreographer, Arthur Ganson creates contraptions composed of a range of materials from delicate wire to welded steel and concrete. Most are viewer-activated or driven by electric motors. All are driven by a wry sense of humor or a probing philosophical concept.

“When making a sculpture,” Ganson says, “It’s always a challenge to say enough but not say too much, to coax with some kind of recognizable bait, then leave the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions and thereby find personal meaning.”

 

Moving objects are playfully linked by intention and subject in A Child and a Ball, which entails an active child mesmerized by a moving ball. In Machine with Wishbone, a real chicken wishbone pulls the very mechanism responsible for its movement. Another sculpture writes the word “Faster” as it is pushed. Other works explore the nature of oiled surfaces, object manipulation, slow explosions, and the organic implications of slow moving roller chain.

In a profile of Ganson in Smithsonian Magazine, David Sims described the sculptor’s work as “retrotechnology with a nineteenth-century quality…. No lasers, no subminiaturized computer wizardry. What you see is what you get,” and, Sims added, ‘People generally get what they see because there are so many different points of entry, an end result of the playful Ganson mind….Kids love Machine with Wishbone because it’s funny, odd, and ingenious. Many adults, on the other hand, see pathos and tragedy as the enslaved little bone drags the clanking contraption behind it. Rube Goldberg meets Jean-Paul Sartre.”

 

Arthur Ganson has been a great inspiration to me. His artistic and engineering skill is articulated with great humour and weightlessness. I just thought I’d put a few videos I found online up here but I recommend the DVD if you really want to see the detail in his work.Self-described as a cross between a mechanical engineer and a choreographer, Arthur Ganson creates contraptions composed of…

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Swarming Structures

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:26:53 GMT

I have an ongoing interest in swarming structures that goes back to my Angels, Flying Reconfigurable Architecture work which I did at the Bartlett a couple of years ago. Going from concept to real truely swarming LTA vehicles is another story but these developments in mobile robotics are interesting glimpses at a possible world made up of ecologies of architectural fragments, whether at a nano or larger scale that. Above is a team of “swarm-bots” negotiating a terrain outside a laboratory in Brussels, Belgium.

Each Swarm-bot is 19 centimetres high, has a rotating turret, a claw-like gripper and moves using a combination of caterpillar tracks and wheels. Each also has a basic computer and is loaded with the same software.

The simple rules laid out in this software allow the robots to perform complex actions as a group. A swarm of ants uses a similar strategy to tackle difficult jobs like carrying a large object. See Film

A red color ring tells others, “Grab me;” blue means “stay away.” Scientists study ant colonies, bird flocks, mammal herds, and fish schools to understand the simple genius of such animal swarms.

I have an ongoing interest in swarming structures that goes back to my Angels, Flying Reconfigurable Architecture work which I did at the Bartlett a couple of years ago. Going from concept to real truely swarming LTA vehicles is another story but these developments in mobile robotics are interesting glimpses at a possible world made up of ecologies of architectural fragments, whether at a nano or…

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Strategic Boredom - Molly Wright Steenson

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:41:04 GMT

An Image of Pask’s Musicolour. The First Interactive Installation that had the potential to bored of people’s behaviourHere’s a great lecture by Molly Wright Steenson on Strategic Bordom. There’s a write up here, by Regine on wmmna from a month ago and now there’s a full video of the lecture online - see below. Molly is currently completing a PhD in Architecture at the Princeton. She is also an interaction designer and design researcher with roots in web, mobile and service design. For more information check her blog out active social plastic here. Part of the talk looks at the important work explored by Gordon Pask in the 1950’s and 60’s on Boredom as a generator for interaction. As I have been doing all week, I will continue to shamelessly plug the current exhibition running in Vienna “Pask Present” exploring his influence in the arts and architecture. 

An Image of Pask’s Musicolour. The First Interactive Installation that had the potential to bored of people’s behaviour Here’s a great lecture by Molly Wright Steenson on Strategic Bordom. There’s a write up here, by Regine on wmmna from a month ago and now there’s a full video of the lecture online - see below. Molly is currently completing a PhD in Architecture at …

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Richard Roberts - Hearing A Reality

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:40:58 GMT

Exploded Axonometric of his most recent electro-acoustic system

Architect Richard Roberts electro-acoustic systems have been developed to explore the sonic properties of environments, and reveal the way in which sound and space co-habit one another. The system uses speakers and panels of resonating metal and gains its input and mode of operation through the cyclical feedback of sound waves from the environment in which it is placed. It is extremely reactive and capable of changing in real-time to anything that alters the acoustic properties of the environment that it exists within.

Richard using one of his electro-acoustic systems to explore the sonic properties of Fort Brockhurst, Portsmouth

Through this work Richard describes how he “discovered that sound is an effective method with which one can explore first and second order cybernetic principles, and that any observer is an integral and inescapable part of their own acoustic space.” Richard explorative works are refined through iterative processes involving prototypes, experimental models, digital animations and drawings. His work is currently being presented at the Pask Present exhibition being held in Vienna from 26th March to 4th April 2008.

Exploded Axonometric of his most recent electro-acoustic system Architect Richard Roberts electro-acoustic systems have been developed to explore the sonic properties of environments, and reveal the way in which sound and space co-habit one another. The system uses speakers and panels of resonating metal and gains its input and mode of operation through the cyclical feedback of sound waves from th…

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Richard Brown

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:22:11 GMT

I’m currently over in Vienna settng up my work for the upcoming Pask Present Exhibition which opens tomorrow. If your in the area feel free to join us for the opening night tomorrow (25th March). One of the artists exhibiting is Richard Brown, so I thought I’d show a taste of his work. Richard Brown has a BSc in Computers & Cybernetics and an MA in Fine Art and works as a hybrid artist, inventor and entrepreneur creating interactive and mimetic experiences using a wide variety of media, including the digital, the analogue and the chemical. His works explores the perception of space, time and energy encompassing ideas from cybernetics, artificial life, interaction design, emergence, complexity and alchemy.

Static Machine

Between 1995 and 2001 Richard was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art where he created and exhibited three major interactive works Alembic (ICA 1998), Biotica (Siggraph 2000) and the Neural Net Starfish (Millennium Dome 2000). Whist at the RCA Richard also published the book “Biotica: Art, Emergence and Artificial- Life“. He has been an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian College of Art, Melbourne University, and artist-in-residence at CEMA (Centre for Electronic Media Arts), Monash University.In 2006 Richard was invited by Edinburgh Informatics to be their first Research Artist in Residence. In this role, he has developed projects combining art, informatics and communications research.

Here are a selection of projects of his but you can see many more at the Pask Present Exhibition.

Electromagnetic Time Machine 1983

An electromagnetic kinetic sculpture using the cybernetic principle of regulatory feedback to generate complex oscillatory behaviour. Each electromagnetic relay is physically coupled to a vertical pendulum and electrically influenced by its immediate neighbour. When a relay closes it causes the relay in front to close only if the relay behind is open, thus creating a regulatory feedback loop with unstable oscillations due to the differing physical weightings of the vertical pendulums. A simple PIR sensor activates the work, the pulsing lights indicating the closing and opening of each relay.

Cybernetics concerns itself with any type of system that involves sensing and feedback, biological, ecological, mechanical and chemical. Gordon Pask created cybernetic feedback mechanisms using electromechanical and analogue components in his works, such as “Colloquy of mobiles” in the same vein, Time Machine represents an alternative paradigm to the digital.

Dendritics I, II and III

The Electrochemical System is inspired by Gordon Pask’s early experiments with electrochemistry. The central negatively charged copper electrode of each glass is surrounded by four positively charged copper electrodes. Copper dendrites grow from the central electrode reaching out to the outer electrodes. The plates are connected so that each glass is in competition with the other, more charge being consumed by the fastest growing dendrite. Each outer electrode is connected via an LED whose brightness indicates the voltage difference.

This work represents an experiment in using dendritic growth as self regulating switching mechanisms, as a dendrite grows, it consumes more potential in competition with other dendrites trying to grow from the same power source. Pask describes the possibilities of chemical computing, the energy systems involved and illustrates a number of circuit possibilities for dendritic circuits on pp 105–108 in his book “An approach to Cybernetics”, Pask 1961.

I’m currently over in Vienna settng up my work for the upcoming Pask Present Exhibition which opens tomorrow. If your in the area feel free to join us for the opening night tomorrow (25th March). One of the artists exhibiting is Richard Brown, so I thought I’d show a taste of his work. Richard Brown has a BSc in Computers & Cybernetics and an MA in Fine Art and works as a hybrid a…

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Pask Present - Exhibition - Vienna

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:59:08 GMT

Atelier Färbergasse, Vienna
26th March to 4th April
Opening ceremony 25th March, 19:00

One of Gordon Pask’s own installations Colloquy of Mobiles exhibited at Cybernetic Serindipity 1968, ICA, London

“Dancing robots, singing sculptures and growing metal tentacles are just some of the bizarre exhibits that will feature in an exhibition of work inspired by eccentric scientist Gordon Pask, one of the forefathers of cybernetics. Gordon Pask (1928-1996) was a British scientist and artist, whose work was key to the development of cybernetics – the study of systems of communication, control mechanisms and feedback. He worked in academia, the arts and industry, producing poetry, plays, interactive sculptures and teaching machines.”

Usman Haques Evolving Sonic Environments III will be one of the works presented

Focused on the influence of Gordon Pask today, the exhibition’s works range from the practical to the bizarre and include pieces by established artists, architects, designers, academics and students. Work has been inspired by many aspects of Gordon Pask’s work, including his interest in analogue computing and his experiments with electrochemistry.

Roman Kirschner’s Roots (2006)

Co-curator Richard Brown, research artist in residence at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, said: “In many ways Gordon Pask was too far ahead of his time – many of his ideas about cybernetics are only just coming into fashion now. Most computer scientists have a different way of thinking compared with him and don’t necessarily understand his ideas – they tend to see computers as machines which are told what to do, whereas Pask was much more interested in having a conversation with the computer.”

Richard Roberts ‘Hearing a Reality’ (2007)

The ‘Pask Present’ exhibition follows the ‘Maverick Machines’, held at the University of Edinburgh last year, the first exhibition of art work inspired by Gordon Pask. It will be held at Atelier Färbergasse, Färbergasse 6, A-1010 Vienna, from 26th March to 4th April, open daily from 13:00 to 21:00. (The opening ceremony will take place on 25th March, 19:00)

More details on the exhibition can be found at www.paskpresent.com

Atelier Färbergasse, Vienna 26th March to 4th April Opening ceremony 25th March, 19:00One of Gordon Pask’s own installations Colloquy of Mobiles exhibited at Cybernetic Serindipity 1968, ICA, London“Dancing robots, singing sculptures and growing metal tentacles are just some of the bizarre exhibits that will feature in an exhibition of work inspired by eccentric scientist Gordon Pask, …

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INTERArChTIVE commission call for entries

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:43:24 GMT

Heres something I’ve been involved in developing recently and one of the many reasons why I’ve been so busy. I’m looking forward to seeing all the exciting entries and I will be profiling the development of the selected work here. Get your entries in!!!

INTERArChTIVE is seeking proposals for an interactive architecture commission, from architects and media arts practitioners. The commission will open and be exhibited during the UK Architecture 08 festival. INTERArChTIVE is aiming to support an innovative, collaborative project that explores the convergence of media arts and architecture.

A budget of £10,000 is estimated for this commission.

Deadline for submissions: 07 April 2008

For further information and the commission brief (pdf) click here.

Heres something I’ve been involved in developing recently and one of the many reasons why I’ve been so busy. I’m looking forward to seeing all the exciting entries and I will be profiling the development of the selected work here. Get your entries in!!! INTERArChTIVE is seeking proposals for an interactive architecture commission, from architects and media arts practitioners. Th…

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Quaser - Jean Michel Crettaz

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:15:57 GMT

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.”
Quasar Exhibition from Aaron Bocanegra on Vimeo.

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.”

Quaser will be exhibited at SCI-Arc until 9th March 2008

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 inte…

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Party Dress - Dana & Karla Karwas

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:54:07 GMT

Party Dress by Dana Karwas and Karla Karwas is a roving performance that is part living architecture: part monumental fashion. It functions as a pavilion worn exclusively by five women that seamlessly injects architecture into fashion by using the body as space.

The dress begins as a shared, bustled garment that gradually unfolds to create a temporary, inhabitable structure. Each seam, each dress, and each body are interconnected by a single, amorphous surface of flowing material.

 

With room for spectators beneath the fabric, Party Dress flirts with traditional concepts of public and private space while adding sparkling wit to the conversation between fashion and architecture. Party Dress works across multiple scales and environments, unraveling conventional notions of space, materiality, and temporality.

Party Dress is part of seamless v.3 fashion show at the Boston Museum of Science on January 30, 2008 at 8pm.
Via Networked Performance

Party Dress by Dana Karwas and Karla Karwas is a roving performance that is part living architecture: part monumental fashion. It functions as a pavilion worn exclusively by five women that seamlessly injects architecture into fashion by using the body as space.The dress begins as a shared, bustled garment that gradually unfolds to create a temporary, inhabitable structure. Each seam, each dress,…

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Spinning Streetlights

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:38:26 GMT

Here’s an interesting wind powered streetlight from the Panasonic Center in Tokyo that I found on hyperexperience blog run by Leonardo Bonanni of MediaLab. I’m a big fan of using these Vertical Axis Wind Turbines for integrating into urban skylines when traditional propellers often seem too dramatic.

Here’s an interesting wind powered streetlight from the Panasonic Center in Tokyo that I found on hyperexperience blog run by Leonardo Bonanni of MediaLab. I’m a big fan of using these Vertical Axis Wind Turbines for integrating into urban skylines when traditional propellers often seem too dramatic.

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Troika - Cloud

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:51:24 GMT

This seems to have spread all over the design and architecture blogs. Cloud by Troika is a beautiful object and really superb piece of engineering, especially with its mix of high tech digital control and nostalgic low tech actuation.

 

There’s a nice video here from youtube and Chris O’Shea has some details on pixelsumo blog which includes some behind the scenes images of the custom software used on the project.

my thanks to Eva Rucki of Troika for the tip

This seems to have spread all over the design and architecture blogs. Cloud by Troika is a beautiful object and really superb piece of engineering, especially with its mix of high tech digital control and nostalgic low tech actuation.There’s a nice video here from youtube and Chris O’Shea has some details on pixelsumo blog which includes some behind the scenes images of the custom sof…

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Shaun Murray

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:22:46 GMT

Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.

Modern architecture has currently failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools for them to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.

Murray has not only helped to develop this interesting and original approach to architecture and ecology (the subject of a Phd) but he has also developed various methods of representing architecture. Like any architect which deals explicitly with the ravages of time; the choreography of sudden and not so sudden shifts in geography and geometry have to be charted. Murray has needed to generate a draughting style that facilitates and explains his ideas.

Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.Modern architecture h…

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AVATAR - Bartlett School of Architecture

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:08:17 GMT

Stuart Munro

A New Website has been launched at Bartlett School of Architecture presenting selected members of AVATAR (the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory). AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. Over recent years AVATAR has grown into an international research collaborative centre with members including Neil Spiller, Bob Sheil, Shaun Murray, Nic Clear, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz.

Spyridon Kaprinis

Stuart Munro A New Website has been launched at Bartlett School of Architecture presenting selected members of AVATAR (the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory). AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. Over recent years AVATAR has grown into an internation…

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Michael Wihart - Soft Architectural Machines

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:03:27 GMT

Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.

“The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectural thinking needs to be constantly questioned in order to reveal if architecture can be a source for the sentimental titillation. The embarrassing meanders of architecture into the challenge of the feasibility must be extended into the poetry of spatial mediation. the process of designing can no longer be solely functional and operational. The creation of an architecture which is embedded in the mythical knowledge of the future enables us to extend the sentiment of in-habitation into the realm of co-existence.”

“Certainly this vision can be engaged to fulfil the concupiscence of a few heroic models but the question if this architecture can establish a casing of affirmative cultural emergence which is the source and site for the engagement of individuals with the fate of their co-habitants, is a different one. Architecture therefore stands for the manifestation of the ambivalence of the transience and the after-effect of the notion of co-existence. But when architects by themselves abandon and forget to realise fantasies which have always already been lost in the dawn of the socialisation, where then will we find the sites for the staging of our sentiments?”

Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.“The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectura…

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BLDGBLOG aka Geoff Manaugh - Lecture - London

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:05:34 GMT

Without question, my favorite blog. Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is talking at the Bartlett this coming wednesday. It is open and free to the public. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.

6.30pm Wednesday 23 January 2008
Darwin Lecture Theatre, UCL
Gower Street
London WC1
Map

Without question, my favorite blog. Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is talking at the Bartlett this coming wednesday. It is open and free to the public. Arrive early to avoid disappointment. 6.30pm Wednesday 23 January 2008 Darwin Lecture Theatre, UCL Gower Street London WC1 Map

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Marcos Cruz - Flesh Architecture

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:32:50 GMT

Marcos Cruz is a practising architect who lives and works in London. He is a co-founder of marcosandmarjan, as well as a Lecturer at the Bartlett UCL (Unit 20). His individual research is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between the human flesh and the architectural flesh. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of digital technologies risks turning the architectural ‘skin’ ever more disembodied, his aim is to put forward the notion of a Thick Embodied Flesh by exploring architectural interfaces that are truly inhabitable.

Conceptually his work delves into the arena of disgust on which the notion of an aesthetic flesh is standing, and it explores new types of ‘neoplasmatic’ conditions in which the future possibility of a neo-biological flesh lies. He proposes Synthetic Neoplasms as new semi-living entities that are identified as partly designed object and partly living material, in which the line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. Hybrid technologies and interdisciplinary work methodologies are required, leading to a revision of our current architectural practice. In his research Marcos Cruz proposes Flesh as a concept that extends the meaning of skin as one of architecture’s most contemporary metaphors.

He recently was awarded his doctorate at the Bartlett for a series of investigations into flesh. Here’s a synopsis of the projects

and here’s an interesting conversation i found between Marcos and his Partner Marjan Colletti on Inhabitation of the Body and Toys

Marcos Cruz is a practising architect who lives and works in London. He is a co-founder of marcosandmarjan, as well as a Lecturer at the Bartlett UCL (Unit 20). His individual research is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between the human flesh and the architectural flesh. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of d…

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Edward Ihnatowicz - The Senster

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:02:13 GMT

Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the UK in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movement sensors to react to the behaviour of the visitors. It was one of the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.

 

Alex Zivanovic, a Visiting Scholar at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, has been researching the work of Edward Ihnatowicz and building an excellent archive which is available online. I am so pleased that Alex is taking the time to research thoroughly how Ihnatowicz not just built the Senster but developed its behaviours. It was a truely ground breaking piece of work that is still a source of inspiration for artists and roboticists today.

Photo Gallery | System Details including Original Code | Structural Design

Ihnatowicz’s interest in the kinetics stemmed from his conviction that the behaviour of something tells us far more about it than its appearance. This led him to build the Senster, one of the most influential kinetic sculptures ever made. It consisted of a fifteen-foot-long steel frame articulated in six different places, with the joints all powered by hydraulics. On the Senster’s ‘head’ were an array of microphones and a Doppler radar system.

The Honeywell mini-computer controlling the mechanism was programmed to make it react to three things: moderate and low sounds, loud sounds, and fast motion. Moderate sounds the head would move towards, loud sounds it would pull back from, and fast motion it would track. The result was an uncanny resemblance to a living thing, and the crowds at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, Holland, where it was on show reacted with enormous excitement. Children would shout and wave at it, call it names, and even throw things. Ihnatowicz explains that its movements seemed to stem from situations that people recognized.

In the quiet of the early morning the machine would be found with its head down, listening to the faint noise of its own hydraulic pumps. Then if a girl walked by the head would follow her, looking at her legs. Ihnatowicz described his own first stomach-turning experience of the machine when he had just got it working: he unconsciously cleared his throat, and the head came right up to him as if to ask, ‘Are you all right?’ He also noticed a curious aspect of the effect the Senster had on people. When he was testing it he gave it various random patterns of motion to go through.

Children who saw it operating in this mode found it very frightening, but no one was ever frightened when it was working in the museum with its proper software, responding to sounds and movement. Although the Senster was dismantled some years ago, many people who saw it still remember vividly what a strong impression it made on them. Edward Ihnatowicz died in 1988. Alex Zivanovic currently continues to build on the archive as well as running science and technology education events and his own firm AZ Consultants, supporting the development of mechatronics projects for medical and industrial applications.

Edward Ihnatowicz Archive

Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the UK in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movemen…

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Living City

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:02:05 GMT

Architects ‘The Living‘ did a great presentation on their design approach to rapid low cost prototyping of interactive environments and construction techniques last year at the ‘Interactive Architecture & Media’ symposium I organised at Eyebeam last February. They’re currently having an exhibition at the Van Alen Institute gallery in New York running till January 18th, so if your in the area I recommend having a look. Below is a synopsis on their research. Using three parallel tracks of research they are exploring three definitions of the Living City.

Video Introduction to Living City

1. The living city - a platform for the future when buildings talk to one another

“

“In the future, buildings will talk to one another. In the era of ubiquitous computing—as sensors disappear into the woodwork and all kinds of data is transferred instantly and wirelessly—buildings will communicate information about their local conditions to a network of other buildings. Architecture will come to life. Living City is an ecology of facades where individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their social network, and respond to the collective body of knowledge.”

2. An exploration of the vitality of the city through new forms of public space—air and facade

“In the future, public space in the city will be everywhere. Air will be public space. Building facades will be public space. Both will belong equally to everyone in the city, no less valuable than the traditional fixed public space of parks and streets. At the intersection of air and facade, public space will be distributed and dynamic. Architecture will come to life. Living City is a definition of air as public space and building facades as public space.”

3. A prototype facade that breathes in response to air quality

 

In the future, walls will breathe. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real time to the dynamic conditions of their surroundings and to a larger network of data. Buildings will host public interfaces to air quality and make visible the invisible conditions of the environment. Architecture will come to life. Living City is a full-scale building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality.”

Architects ‘The Living‘ did a great presentation on their design approach to rapid low cost prototyping of interactive environments and construction techniques last year at the ‘Interactive Architecture & Media’ symposium I organised at Eyebeam last February. They’re currently having an exhibition at the Van Alen Institute gallery in New York running till Januar…

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Ruth Ron - WallFold

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:55:36 GMT

Ruth Ron is an architect and interactive media artist. She has done a number of interactive installations bridging telecommunications technologies and architecture, many of which are focused on dematerializing architectural structures such as transformative walls, walls that turn into windows, windows into views of remote spaces. She is currently a visiting Professor at the University of Florida, below is her recent WallFold piece, you can see many more of her projects here.

Ruth describes WallFold as a “Physical Sculpture that tries to generate an ambiguous spatial condition. Smooth and flexible folds between inside and outside, open and close. The space thus becomes continuous and dynamic. The installation uses six pairs of servomotors connected by flexible bands to create a smooth surface. The motors alternate between two positions (0°, 180°), stretching the binary ON/ OFF positions into a continuous transition, a whole grayscale or gradient between 1 and 0.”

Ruth Ron is an architect and interactive media artist. She has done a number of interactive installations bridging telecommunications technologies and architecture, many of which are focused on dematerializing architectural structures such as transformative walls, walls that turn into windows, windows into views of remote spaces. She is currently a visiting Professor at the University of Florida,…

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Interactive Architecture Lecture @ Kunsthaus Graz

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:46:51 GMT

As part of the Europrix exhibition held in the Kunsthaus,Graz, I did a short presentation about my views on Interactive Architecture and its relationships to other fields in the arts and sciences both practically and conceptually and also where my Performative Ecologies project fits into my research. See below and I apologies for saying ummm a lot, I never realised I did until I watched this.

As part of the Europrix exhibition held in the Kunsthaus,Graz, I did a short presentation about my views on Interactive Architecture and its relationships to other fields in the arts and sciences both practically and conceptually and also where my Performative Ecologies project fits into my research. See below and I apologies for saying ummm a lot, I never realised I did until I watched this. Part…

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Life Spectulatrix - Augmented Architectures

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:39:18 GMT

Video

Here’s one of Augmented Architecture’s prototypes that I saw at the ACADIA07 earlier this year. “Life Spectulatrix” is an evolutionary physical skin based on digital environmental feedback retrieved through the webspace. Architect Nancy Diniz describes how it becomes a “universally situated living piece” through its own evolutionary behaviour in relation to global environmental information as well as local interaction.

“Augemented Architectures” is : Nancy Diniz, a licensed architect and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett and a tutor at the Department of Architecture at ISCTE in Lisbon and Cesar Branco, a computer science engineer working for VSNL as a Solutions Architect based in London, UK.

Video Here’s one of Augmented Architecture’s prototypes that I saw at the ACADIA07 earlier this year. “Life Spectulatrix” is an evolutionary physical skin based on digital environmental feedback retrieved through the webspace. Architect Nancy Diniz describes how it becomes a “universally situated living piece” through its own evolutionary behaviour in relation …

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Mader Stublic Wiermann

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:38:00 GMT

reprojected

I first encountered the work of Mader Stublic Wiermann when Alexander Stublic did a talk at the MediaArchitecture Conference earlier this year. He presented four projects by the group in different technical environments focusing on correlations of space by extending and transforming architectural structures. I won’t cover the entire scope of their work here but their website has more detailed descriptions of what they’ve been up to in recent years. Below was one project in particular that I like as it starts to transform the rigid structure of an architecture into a dynamic fluid skin.

twists and turns

The exterior of the Uniqa Tower in Vienna has been equipped with a LED-grid, a wide-meshed net of picture elements capable of receiving video-data, which are fitted into the building’s facade. At first, the electronic data corresponds to the architectural structure of the tower, but during the course of its choreography, repeatedly detaches itself from the concrete shape of the building, establishing new spaces which dynamically interweave.

reprojected I first encountered the work of Mader Stublic Wiermannwhen Alexander Stublic did a talk at theMediaArchitecture Conference earlier this year. He presented four projects by the group in different technical environments focusing on correlations of space by extending and transforming architectural structures. I won’t cover the entire scope of their work here but their website has mo…

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David Rokeby - Cloud

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:49:40 GMT

One project that caught my eye from Regine’s posts covering the VIDA awards was David Rokeby’s Cloud Installation currently suspended in the Great Hall at the Ontario Science Centre. One hundred identical sculptural elements, arranged in ten by ten grid, are rotated at slightly differing speeds by computer-controlled motors. The elements slowly shift in and out of synchronization. When the motors are just out of sync, huge waves ripple across the space. When completely in sync, the work appears almost solid then suddenly almost invisible. When far out of sync, the sculptural elements float in apparent chaos. Cloud creates constantly shifting fields and patterns in the space of the Great Hall, playing with the tension between chaos and order, between scientific theory and human experience, and between objectivity and subjectivity.

 

Cloud is large arrangement of identical simple elements. The smallest elements of the work are a pair of thin acrylic planes crossing each other perpendicularly on their short side. One is clear, the other is a light blue grey. Six sets of these planes are arranged in identical orientation along an acrylic shaft. A stepper motor slowly rotates each shaft. 100 of these motor shaft sets are set up in a 10 x 10 configuration to create an open form. The 100 units are identical, replaceable and interchangeable. They are attached to a 10 x 10 grid of aluminum. All motors are connected to a computer which maintains the desired relationship of rotations speeds and positions.

There are three distinct states of organization of this structure. When all rotations are identical, the structure resembles a solid, both subjectively and formally. As the rotations shift away from this solid state, the structure melts into a liquid-like flow, with waves clearly traversing the structure. Beyond a certain point, the relationships between the rotations becomes unclear and the structure resembles the random incoherence of a gas. The transitions between identifiable states reflect the transitions of melting, freezing, evaporating, condensing and sublimating.

One project that caught my eye from Regine’s posts covering the VIDA awards was David Rokeby’s Cloud Installation currently suspended in the Great Hall at the Ontario Science Centre. One hundred identical sculptural elements, arranged in ten by ten grid, are rotated at slightly differing speeds by computer-controlled motors. The elements slowly shift in and out of synchronization. Whe…

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Sean Hanna

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:46:38 GMT

Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems in architecture, and in structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology. I’ve selected a couple of his projects to give a sample of his work but check out his website for more details. His work is part of the currently running “Capture & Context” exhibition I posted on early this week.

BODY / SPACE / FRAME

Sean role in the BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley was in the creation of methods for generating a body formally and constructing a geometry appropriate for and structurally constructing the 25 metre high sculpture. Built out of an open steel lattice in the shape of a crouching figure, it was sited on the end of an 800 metre polder and faced outward from the coast of the Zuiderzee, Holland.

PAN_07 CHAIR

Optimised cellular structure in collaboration with Timothy Schreiber

Based on an analogy with the highly efficient cellular structure of living wood or bone, which adapts to its environment as it grows, the chair’s interior is comprised of a fine lattice that minimises weight while maximising strength. The design method combines principles of evolution and artificial intelligence to create a material that responds to its environment by growing denser in the areas required to best withstand the external forces applied when the chair is in use.

Sean’s website

Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational…

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Capture & Context - London

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:38:01 GMT

Here’s a last minute plug for “Capture & Context“, an exhibition opening at the Bartlett in London tomorrow. The exhibition presents the work of current EngD students at the Bartlett exploring innovative approaches to Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualization. It will show work in progress towards their individual research goals, representing a cross section of multi-stranded concerns, ranging from computer vision and real-time rendering to simulation and design optimization, overlaping fields of expertise in computer science, architecture, engineering and complex systems science. Exhibitors include Mojtaba Bahrami, Erica Calogero, Sean Hanna, Katrin Jonas, Chris Leung, Karen Martin, Abel Maciel, Alastair Moore, Jamie O’Brien, James Tompkin. Check out the website for more details.

Here’s a last minute plug for “Capture & Context“, an exhibition opening at the Bartlett in London tomorrow. The exhibition presents the work of current EngD students at the Bartlett exploring innovative approaches to Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualization. It will show work in progress towards their individual research goals, representing a cross section of multi-…

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Performative Ecologies takes over the Kunsthaus Graz

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:17:50 GMT

BIX facade at the Kunsthaus

Here’s my first “Breaking News”, me and my Performative Ecologies project have taken over the Kunsthaus Graz and the vision of the robots interacting with people within the building and walking by is being transmitted onto the BIX building facade. It will be running for the next 4 hours so check it out using the Live Webcam


A screenshot of the webcam tonight as “interactive architecture dot org” ran accross it

I’m over here in Graz for the Europrix Exhibition but more about that later

BIX facade at the Kunsthaus Here’s my first “Breaking News”, me and my Performative Ecologies project have taken over the Kunsthaus Graz and the vision of the robots interacting with people within the building and walking by is being transmitted onto the BIX building facade. It will be running for the next 4 hours so check it out using the Live WebcamA screenshot of the webcam toni…

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Funky Forest

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:27:56 GMT

Video

The test of any good installation is how children respond and few I’ve seen get this kind of intuitive response. Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille, made ‘Funky Forest‘ which premiered at the 2007 Cinekid festival in the Netherlands. ‘Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.

Funcky Forest was made with openFrameworks which Theo is involved in developing.

Video The test of any good installation is how children respond and few I’ve seen get this kind of intuitive response. Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille, made ‘Funky Forest‘ which premiered at the 2007 Cinekid festival in the Netherlands. ‘Funky Forest’ is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep th…

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Evoke - Usman Haque

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:49:36 GMT

Evoke by Architect & Artist Usman Haque is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, that lights up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.

The cathedral, built to link conceptually earth to the heavens, has been a site for the conveyance of words, dreams and aspirations for hundreds of years. The facade is designed to orient the gazes of passers-by upwards. As an attempt to continue this tradition, the patterns of Evoke are generated in realtime by the words, sounds, music and noises produced collectively by the public, determined by their particular voice characteristics. The colours will skim the surface of the Minster, pour round its features and crevasses, emerging finally near the top of the facade where they will sparkle high overhead.

People with voices of different frequencies, rhythms or cadences will be able to evoke quite different magical patterns upon the surface of the building - a staccato chirping will result in a completely different set of visual effects to a long howl for example, blending old and new to continue animating the facade of the Minster.

Evoke is commissioned by Illuminating York 2007.

Evoke by Architect & Artist Usman Haque is a massive animated 80,000 lumen projection, that lights up the facade of York Minster. The facade is brought to life by members of the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour.T…

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Image Radio

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:57:53 GMT

PixFlow #2 - LAb [au]

From November 2 – 4, 2007, Image Radio is being held in Eindhoven, NL. The festival will be presenting a series of interactive installations that investigate the phenomenon of ‘Urban Screens’: Looking at how moving images in public space could function beyond commercial applications. MAD has collected for Image Radio a selection of international artists whose work directly addresses these issues. Here are some of the works being presented.

• Adger Stokvisch - Hypergraphia
• Brecht Debackere - Z-City
• Brian Knep - Drift
• Crea Composite
• Erik Conrad - Palpable City
• HFR-LAB - City Scan
• Jack Backrack - Follow the leader
• Kaiser & Eshkar - Pedestrian
• LAb [au] - PixFlow
• Matthias Oostrik - Interactive Light Wall
• Screenings Video Art
• Urban Waves

Check out their website for more details.

PixFlow #2 - LAb [au] From November 2 – 4, 2007, Image Radio is being held in Eindhoven, NL. The festival will be presenting a series of interactive installations that investigate the phenomenon of ‘Urban Screens’: Looking at how moving images in public space could function beyond commercial applications. MAD has collected for Image Radio a selection of international artists whos…

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Roots - Roman Kirschner

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:17:16 GMT

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.

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 Performa…

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Performative Ecologies nominated for Europrix Top Talent Award

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:37:12 GMT

I’m excited to hear that my most recent interactive installation Performative Ecologies has been nominated for the Europrix Top Talent Awards with the exhibition being held at the Kunsthaus Graz. on the 23rd and 24th of November. This of course means that I now have to rebuild the entire thing and fly it over to Austria, which is a huge amount of work that I han’t planned for, so the next couple of weeks are going to be pretty quite on this blog. If your in Graz in late November be sure to pop in.

I’m excited to hear that my most recent interactive installation Performative Ecologies has been nominated for the Europrix Top Talent Awards with the exhibition being held at the Kunsthaus Graz. on the 23rd and 24th of November. This of course means that I now have to rebuild the entire thing and fly it over to Austria, which is a huge amount of work that I han’t planned for, so the …

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Emotional Architecture?

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:47:33 GMT

2001: A Space Odyssey (196

So what does the future hold for us? And what will technology enable us or indeed disable us from achieving. Futuristic visions from science fiction cinema borrow much from the leading technology of their time, to imagine our future homes, workplaces and cities. I’ve always had a laugh watching the 1940’s-50’s films which show a house wife getting her personal tin foil wrapped robot to do the dishes while she can get on with other important jobs like getting her makeup on to greet her husband when he comes in from a hard day at the office.

Leave It to Roll-Oh (1940)

Well its hardly suprising that film makers had less glossy visions of the future and I’ve been making a special effort recently to watch films that have explored the kinds of future architecture and cities we may one day inhabit. I recently saw on Regine’s excellent We Make Money Not Art a link to the Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time. which has given me plenty of the darker visions to examine. One idea in particular which captured the imagination of many writers and directors was that of artificial intelligence and the kinds of power struggles that could ensue between humanity and intelligent agents. With the development of my own work in adaptive systems recently, I have spent a considerable amount of my work invested in understanding the current state of artificial intelligence research. I’m pleased to see that the dystopian visions of man vs machine are for the time being at least, some way off, since we can’t get much more than insect level intelligence out of computational systems.

 

Metropolis (1927)

 

None the less, progress is being made and it was while visiting MIT last week that I got an opportunity to listen to Marvin Minsky speak a little, about his involvement in the development of AI since the 1960’s.  He currently believes “we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events”; we need to break our thought processes down into the most precise steps possible. In fact, in order to truly understand the human mind, Minsky suggests, we’ll probably need to reverse-engineer a machine that can replicate those functions so we can study it. Thus, he rejects the idea of consciousness as a unitary “Self” in favor of “a decentralized cloud” of more than 20 distinct mental processes. In this view, emotional states like love and shame are not the opposite of rational cogitation; both, Minsky says, are ways of thinking.

A FREE draft Copy of his recent book The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind is available from his website (find links below)

The Emotion Machine : Marvin Minsky

Introduction  Chapter 1. Falling in Love  Chapter 2. Attachments and Goals 
Chapter 3. From Pain to Suffering   Chapter 4, What in the world is Consciousness?  Chapter 5, Levels of Mental Activities  Chapter 6, Common Sense  Chapter 7, Thinking   Chapter 8, Resourcefulness  Chapter 9, The Self  Bibliography

or you can buy the completed book from amazon.
The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (Hardcover)

One of Minsky’s long standing claims is that common sense is very hard to explain or program. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview.

    Back when I was writing The Society of Mind, we worked for a couple of years on making a computer understand a simple children’s story: “Mary was invited to Jack’s party. She wondered if he would like a kite.” If you ask the question “Why did Mary wonder about a kite?” everybody knows the answer — it’s probably a birthday party, and if she’s going that means she has been invited, and everybody who is invited has to bring a present, and it has to be a present for a young boy, so it has to be something boys like, and boys like certain kinds of toys like bats and balls and kites. You have to know all of that to answer the question. We managed to make a little database and got the program to understand some simple questions. But we tried it on another story and it didn’t know what to do. Some of us concluded that you’d have to know a couple million things before you could make a machine do some common-sense thinking.

I Robot (2004)

He goes onto explain that emotions enable us to swap between different modes of thinking depending on the situation:

    The main idea in the book is what I call resourcefulness. Unless you understand something in several different ways, you are likely to get stuck. So the first thing in the book is that you have got to have different ways of describing things. I made up a word for it: “panalogy.” When you represent something, you should represent it in several different ways, so that you can switch from one to another without thinking.

Silent Running (1972)

    The second thing is that you should have several ways to think. The trouble with AI is that each person says they’re going to make a system based on statistical inference or genetic algorithms, or whatever, and each system is good for some problems but not for most others. The reason for the title The Emotion Machine is that we have these things called emotions, and people think of them as mysterious additions to rational thinking. My view is that an emotional state is a different way of thinking.

    When you’re angry, you give up your long-range planning and you think more quickly. You are changing the set of resources you activate. A machine is going to need a hundred ways to think. And we happen to have a hundred names for emotions, but not for ways to think. So the book discusses about 20 different directions people can go in their thinking. But they need to have extra meta-knowledge about which way of thinking is appropriate in each situation.

Minsky also expresses disappointment about “how few people have been working on higher-level theories of how thinking works”, that too many “people look around to see what field is currently popular, and then waste their lives on that. If it’s popular, then to my mind you don’t want to work on it.”

Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)

I’m personally more a fan of Rodney Brooks who claims that Minsky erred in not putting the concepts of situatedness and embodiment onto the AI research agenda and from the work I’ve personally done with building simple robotic systems, Brooks approach is more applicable to the kinds of systems I create but Minsky’s ideas do raise the question, will we need to spoon feed our architecture common sense? There is no clear cut answer for all circumstances but personally I find bottom up strategies of situatedness and embodiment more appealing from an architectural perspective.

2001: A Space Odyssey (196 So what does the future hold for us? And what will technology enable us or indeed disable us from achieving. Futuristic visions from science fiction cinema borrow much from the leading technology of their time, to imagine our future homes, workplaces and cities. I’ve always had a laugh watching the 1940’s-50’s films which show a house wife getting her…

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Seagulls

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:05:25 GMT

Here’s an interesting use of aluminium louvers and LED technology recently installed at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The new building, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad, is illuminated on the south side using RGB color changing LED lighting supplied by Light Projects and Tryka.

 

The LED lighting illuminates the façade by casting light on the underneath of the freely-placed, folded aluminium louvers, which the designers have nicknamed “seagulls”. The building has an outer glass curtain wall, with the seagulls positioned on a tensioned cable net about 0.75 m away to protect the building from solar gain.

via mediarchitecture

Here’s an interesting use of aluminium louvers and LED technology recently installed atMoorfields Eye Hospital in London. The new building, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad, is illuminated on the south side using RGB color changing LED lighting supplied by Light Projects and Tryka.The LED lighting illuminates the façade by casting light on the underneath of the freely-plac…

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Light-Emitting Roof Tiles

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:59:37 GMT

The roof has historically focused on one primary function: keeping out the elements. New technologies, as present in Light-Emitting Roof Tiles, allow the integration of additional functions within roof surfaces. Manufactured by Lambert Kamps, the transparent roof tiles are integrated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and designed to display text, pictures, and other graphical content in multiple colors. Information may also be animated, such as with an illuminated news trailer. Light-Emitting Roof Tiles also come with their own self-supporting solar-photovoltaic power system. via transmaterial

The roof has historically focused on one primary function: keeping out the elements. New technologies, as present in Light-Emitting Roof Tiles, allow the integration of additional functions within roof surfaces. Manufactured by Lambert Kamps, the transparent roof tiles are integrated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and designed to display text, pictures, and other graphical content in multiple color…

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Kengo Kuma - Weak Architecture

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:12:38 GMT

 

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

  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 whitetextile blossom. In its interior, comprising a surface of approximately twenty square metres…

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Seduced by Light

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:04:24 GMT

Dazed Digital recently published a series of three exclusive documentaries on artists who work with light as their medium. Two of these in particular, Jason Bruges Studio and United Visual Artists are common sights on this blog, producing a number of impressive large scale interactive installations in galleries and exhibitions, as well as embedding responsive lighting technologies into public spaces, furniture and building facades.

UVA’s installation Echo - Tate Modern - June 2006

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes, what technologies they use and how these companies came about in the first place, these videos give a unique insight into the stories behind their day to day routines as well as their aspirations and future projects in the pipeline. Alongside these commercial practices and in contrast to the scale of Jason Bruges and UVA, the final documentary is a more personal story about the art work of independent artist David Batchelor. His pieces fusing scuplture and light explore the concept of colour as a unique phenomenon: how colour is omnipresence in everyday experience, and how it transcends function and aesthetics to create its own symbolic orders.

Jason Bruges Studio Documentary

United Visual Artists Documentary

David Batchelor Documentary

Dazed Digital recently published a series of three exclusive documentaries on artists who work with light as their medium. Two of these in particular, Jason Bruges Studio and United Visual Artists are common sights on this blog, producing a number of impressive large scale interactive installations in galleries and exhibitions, as well as embedding responsive lighting technologies into public spa…

Read more…

Peter Cook - Lecture - London

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:23:25 GMT

6.30pm Wednesday 3 October 2007

Sir Peter Cook, The Bartlett Chair of Architecture from 1991-2005, returns to the Bartlett in 2007 to open the 2007/08 International Lecture Series with his talk titled “2 Years of Gossip and Some Stuff Going On”. Its open to the public so get their early to avoid disappointment. It is being held at the Darwin Lecture Theatre Located on Gower Street, London. Unfortunately I’m away in Canada next week at the ACADIA conference, so I won’t be able to go to it, but I was at his talk last year at the Bartlett and it was really good fun as you’d probably expect.

6.30pm Wednesday 3 October 2007 Sir Peter Cook, The Bartlett Chair of Architecture from 1991-2005, returns to the Bartlett in 2007 to open the 2007/08 International Lecture Series with his talk titled “2 Years of Gossip and Some Stuff Going On”. Its open to the public so get their early to avoid disappointment. It is being held at the Darwin Lecture Theatre Located on Gower Street, Lond…

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MediaArchitecture - Media Urbanism

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:02:41 GMT

Media Urbanism hosted by Mirjam Struppek was the second panel of the MediaArchitecture conference I recently attended. Mirjam began by highlighting the new challenges faced in urban design and planning caused by the use of media technologies, in particular, LED screens. The main focus was how these technologies have a social impact and how how cities have responded to these entering our public spaces. Along side the discussion on urbanism, individual projects were discussed by some of the panelists who are working in the field of interactive design and architecture.

Mirjam Struppek has been very active over the past couple of years organizing events such as Urban Screens 05 held in Amsterdam, and building up a great online resource for people interested in how the currently commercial use of outdoor screens can be broadened with cultural content.  “We want to network and sensitise all engaged parties for the possibilities of using the digital infrastructure for contributing to a lively urban society, binding the screens more to the communal context of the space and therefore creating local identity and engagement. The integration of the current information technologies support the development of a new integrated digital layer of the city in a complex merge of material and immaterial space that redefine the function of this growing infrastructure.”

Malcom McCullough

Following Mirjam’s introduction Malcom McCullough spoke about how this new medium added another layer of information to the city and how information could be considered in itself a kind of pollution. He described how the ratio of information to knowledge is declining and the responses some cities have had to mediafacades that contain commercial content.

Sau Paulo following the ban on urban advertising

Malcom used the example of Sau Paulo where on January 1st, 2007, the city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.  The ban on what the mayor calls “visual pollution” was the culmination of a long battle between the city’s politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil’s economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past. More Images

Prof. Joachim Sauter - ART+COM - New Media in Public Space

ART+COM are a well known and highly regarded German interaction design studio who have done a number of public interactive installations. Joachim as a director spoke about their practice and their approach to using media technologies to create dynamic spatial experiences.

Renders of one of the projects Joachim Sauter discussed called Duality

“During the last years, “New” Media have advanced more and more from private and semi-public institutional spaces into public city space. The reasons for this are two fold. The necessary technologies have become cheaper, more easily manageable and more stable; users of city space are media literate, and the designers and decision makers are better educated and skilled.”

In the design of media façades, ART+COM are directed by two principles stemming from “façade’s” etymological root ‘facies”, Latin for ‘face’. They design  “the skin of a face, not a mask or make-up. This means that the media have to be an integral part of the architecture, not something added as an obvious later thought. The second principle is the face’s mimics and its expression. The narrative on the façade is thus expressive of the building, its architectural stance and its interior. The façade is a membrane from inside to outside and from outside to inside.”

“Duality” completed

Joachim went through a number of projects which I can’t cover all of here. One project in particular which caught my eye was “Duality“. Located on the bank of an artificial pond at the exit of the metro station Osaki. The project deals with the “duality between liquid / solid, real / virtual and water ripples / light waves. Pedestrians walk over a 6 x 6 meters large LED plane, installed right on the edge of the water. The LEDs are covered with translucent glass diffusing their light. With their steps, the passers-by provoke virtual waves on the LED plane, computed in real-time. When these waves hit the edge of the pond, they are extended into the water as real ripples. It looks really magical and brought a childish smile to my face with its combination of screen and kinetic technology.

see more of ART+COM’s projects here

Andrew Shoben - Greyworld - Transforming the City into an Urban Playground

Greyworlds “The Source”

Andrew spoke about ways of transforming the urban realm into a public playground. To allow some form of self-expression, through small interventions in the urban surround, in areas of the city that people see everyday but normally exclude and ignore. Using Greyworlds own projects such as The Source (2004) their 32m kinetic sculpture which opens the London market every morning at the London Stock Exchange as well as their much lower tech railings project , he presented how Play can be an intergral part of the experience of our whole built environment.

Greyworld Railings project

 

 

 

Andrew talked about how he wanted people to find emotional connections with their work and give little twists to the urban experience”Art for people on the way to the supermarket” as he put it. Greyworlds “Railings” project was a perfect example of this, working with the childish pleasure of running a stick along a set of railings to make a “clack-clack-clack” sound. Instead of a clack clack sound they tuned the railings so that when you ran a stick along them they it played “the Girl from Ipanema.”

Michael Batz - Hamburg Art Ensemble: Scenographies of a CityMichael spoke of how Contemporary Lighting Master Plans define the underlying conditions for lighting public spaces: intelligent harmonization of all light sources on the urban stage in order to give the greatest flexibility while at the same time consuming as little energy as possible. “A new perception-oriented approach to lighting planning for architecture and urban areas is now becoming significant, in contrast to earlier technical-functional methods. Accentuated by the paradigm shift towards the “reflecting city” from the traditional stone and translucent (glass) cities, responsibilities for transforming the townscape and the city identity have now received political meaning.”

 

panel - Mirjam Struppek, Malcom McCullough, Michael Batz, Andrew Shoben and Joachim Sauter

 

He also explained that any attempt to do justice to a locality must inevitably take into account the existing specific architecture. Basically, it is not a matter of ‘throwing’ light at a group of structures, but using light to accentuate them as a special treasure of the city. In other documentation of Michael I found this quote particularly interesting “Rhythmisation, characterisation, accentuation - concepts traditionally used in the theatre - are appropriate here. Atmosphere, emotion and changes in ways of viewing are qualities that have a major influence on the character of a city. Artistic concepts can be compositionally fruitful here: playing with tones and hierarchies of brightness, temporary strong chords over restful bass lines, the rejection of over-accentuation, deliberate omissions and the retention of the essence of darkness.” A general discussion at the end focused on the problems each of the presenters had with the idea of the architecture being overwhelmed by screen technology. One mentioned that the architecture of the cityscape is scenographic enough and questioned if there was any need to embed stories when architecture can do that itself? I couldn’t agree more with this statement and I’m glad that the entire conference was focused on the really important question, how media technologies can go beyond “urban screens”, beyond hi-tech billboard s for advertising and engage us in new types of scenographic and emotive experience. It was evident in the work of ART+COM and Greyworld that there is clearly a lot of potential, for spatial and time-based narration that could go beyond linear and undemocratic screens. The next morning I was lucky enough to be starting the 2nd day of talks with this issue in mind, and presented how I thought contemporary architecture and urban design could learn a lot from some of the mediaarchitecture of the 1950’s and 60’s… more on that soon.

 

Media Urbanism hosted by Mirjam Struppek was the second panel of the MediaArchitecture conference I recently attended. Mirjam began by highlighting the new challenges faced in urban design and planningcaused by the use of media technologies, in particular, LED screens. The main focus was how these technologies have a social impact and how how cities have responded to these entering our public spa…

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Colour Responsive Chairs - Moritz Waldemeyer

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:51:08 GMT

By Royal Appointment is a set of responsive chairs by Moritz Waldemeyer. As a person sits in the chair, an RGB colour sensor in the back reads the colour of their clothing. The colour LEDs on the back of the chair then gradually fade into the colour of the sitter. “This gives the individual sitting on i