Performative Ecologies
Investigating gestural forms of dialogue between inhabitants and an evolving environment, Performative Ecologies is a kinetic ‘conversational’ environment, which examines what it means both to observe, and to be observed by machines. It considers in the light of developments in computer vision, sensing and artificial intelligence, how an ‘intelligent’ architecture can discuss its behaviour in relation to the goals and behaviours of the world around it.
“The role of the architect… I think, is not so much to design a building or city, as to catalyse them: to act that they may evolve.” Gordon Pask
Iterations 2005-2008
Dancers 2008
Within the darkened installation space, a dance evolves as a community of autonomous but very sociable robotic sculptures perform with their illuminated tails for inhabitants. Rather than being pre-choreographed, these creatures propose and negotiate with their audience, learning how best to attract and maintain their attention. Using a genetic algorithm to evolve performances, and facial recognition to assess attention levels (fitness), the individual dancers learn from their successes and failures. As they gain experience, they share their knowledge with the larger ecology, dancing to each other, exchanging their most successful techniques, and negotiating future performances collaboratively. An ecology constructed by both robotic sculptures and the human inhabitants through an intertwining of networks rich in circularities of reciprocal gestures and adaption. A dance is formed in which individual participants both human and robotic operate as performative agents, each acting independently, but continually negotiating their choreography with each other. This social system revisits some of the concepts first considered in Gordon Pask’s art work, the ‘Colloquy of Mobiles’, exhibited at Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968). Like the colloquy of mobiles, it is an environment of active conversational participants, a physically constructed embodiment of his Conversation Theory, unlike it, this work uses new technologies unavailable to Pask and explores how Pask’s ideas can be extended using contemporary digital technology.
Signallers 2007
Signallers was initally an investigation of generating kinetic behaviours for use in a robotic armature through the use of light source tracking. It quickly became however a project more about how a kinetic object could use these behaviours and learn from their successes and failures. Inspired by the experimental light tracing Photography of Gjon Mili, Signallers was an environment made up of a darkened room with a robotic armature centered within it. The armature actuated a light source on the tip of an acrylic rod in 360 degrees.
Angels 2006
Investigates ways of constructing intelligent agents that work as independent spatial features or combine to assemble virtually infinite constructs. The ‘Angel’ project plays with architectures historically rigid nature playfully looking at the possibilities of an architecture lighter than air capable of sheltering us and even bringing communities together.
The initial concept developed out of a building proposal in which a conversation space could transform its spatial conditions reacting to a set of protocols based on inhabitant’s discourse. The constantly reconfiguring space was actuated by a series of agents that could descend, rise, approach and retreat from the people within the space as well as articulate a range of behaviours. These “Gestures” attempted to act as catalysts for the generation of new conversation and interaction. This investigation led to the exploration of LTA (Lighter Than Air) Vehicles capable of acting independently or in flocks constructing dynamic spaces for people to meet.
Reciprocal Space 2005
Interactive Architecture as a field of research has key characteristics. These interactive spaces must feel / experience its inhabitants and respond in a way that challenges the inhabitants to reciprocally respond. If it fails to challenge their cognitive perception of the space, then it fails to engage the inhabitants of the space and a reciprocal relationship will not be created “derived from the particulars of the real world, from data and processes of the virtual world, or from numerous techniques of capturing the real and casting it into virtual, motion capture for instance. Since time is a feature of the model, if the model is fed time-based data, the form becomes animate, the architecture liquid. ” Marcos Novak
More Coming Soon…
Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands
Released October 2009
Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands, is a collection of the latest, provocative projects from the field of digitally-enabled architecture. Oscillating between the analog and the digital, from concept to realisation this is a book that maps process.
The book covers a spectrum of London’s leading graduates and young practices, featuring projects from the Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), University of Westminster and Royal College of Art, and case studies and interviews with architects including Amanda Levete Architects, Plasma Studio, JDS Architects, sixteen* (makers), Horhizon, marcosandmarjan, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, Philip Beesley, David Greene, Samantha Hardingham, Usman Haque and Neil Spiller.
I’m pleased to announce that “Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands” is now available here. It has been co-Authored by myself and Sara Shafiei. Book design Emily Chicken and Edited by Joanna Lee.
Participatory Frameworks
A long running project exploring participative practices for developing architecture through community interaction. Participatory Frameworks explores how interaction between the designers of environments, and the societies that are intended to use these environments creates ‘excess’. That the interaction of two people (for example) leads to more than the cumulative knowledge and expertise of both but rather through exchange leads to new, unexpected opportunities, not previously conceivable from the constituent parts.
Running in parallel to my ‘Performative Ecologies’ research on building digitally enabled ‘intelligent’ architecture. The project is currently developing as a series of workshops exploring how people understand space, how we might incourage them to imagine new spaces, and what the role of the architect is in social environments where the archtecture is reconfigurable and shared.
Distant Earth 2009
Coming Soon
Connected Environments 2007
Coming Soon
Creating an Ecology 2006
Coming Soon
C.L.A.V.E. 2005
Coming Soon
Notating Interaction
Finding methods by which to represent interaction with architectural representation is an ongoing interest of mine. Euclidean space presuppositions have long ago proved short on providing an adequate model both for physical and for metaphysical spatial considerations. Alternative geometrical models of space became available more than a century ago. Higher-dimensional, or curved, space appeared more suitable to accommodate the needs of a broad range of disciplines.
Based on the fundamental relationship between form, reality and any human interaction with the external world. As part of the research spaces investigation at UCL I begun looking at the types of non-euclidean models I could use to explore relationship between subjectivity and alternative geometrical models of space.
Akin to one of the four “Research Spaces” conference strands [Conceptual Spaces], the piece investigated the relationship between space and the knowing subject and interrelationships between subjects and objects in art [and] architecture. Aiming at the initiation of the participants to an alternative model of our physical space, The sculpture/notation/ interactive installation aimed primarily to alert participants of common assumptions about the physical and geometrical nature of space within our everyday perception. Participants were given the opportunity to experiment with engaging these new models of space through interaction.
Interactive Architecture.Org
Interactive Architecture.Org was started in 2005 as a means of finding links between the huge range of disciplines developing responsive materials, objects, environments and architecture. I am now editor of the site which I continue to contribute to with the support of guest writers. As I say on the blog, Interactive Architecture covers emerging architectural and artistic practices where digital technologies & virtual spaces merge with tangible and physical spatial experiences. An active architecture, sensing, observing, feeling, listening, thinking, reacting, proposing, adapting, learning, even sometimes interacting. It is an architecture in constant flux best suited to prototyping and semi-perminant installations.
