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…