Posts Tagged ‘architexture’

Kinetics of Interactivity

August 26th, 2010 researchTags: architexture, city, haunted space, interactive, kinetic

Thinking about “Public Interactives” implies thinking about interactivity as an activity that occurs preeminently in space, and more specifically, in a locale.

Ludologists tend to understand interactivity as a product of systems, an interlocking mechanism of a series of actions performed by the player in response to a set of rules, whether these are the implicit logic of a game of tag or the constraints built into the virtual environment of World of Warcraft. Rules constitute both allowances and boundaries. They channel a flow of movement that keeps the game in motion, but that also demarcates possible actions from impossible ones. This flow has been characterized as the feeling of irrepressible rightness that sometimes accompanies the accomplishment of procedure (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004); “ludos”, to reprise Roger Caillois’s term for this type of rule-based play, is always spatially and temporally choreographed.

Interactive systems also seem to work best when they strike a sort of golden mean with the player: neither too difficult (which would lead to frustration) nor too predictable (which would lead to boredom). Interestingly, frustration and boredom are emotions that express stasis: they are stoppers of flow, they end the interaction. Emotional momentum, on the other hand, sustains play, and expresses itself in a feeling of elation, control, expectation, curiosity.

Not coincidentally, many games, including digital ones, place momentum at the core of their gameplay – whether kicking a ball across a field in soccer or sliding down a series of icy chutes in Mario. The emotional consequences of physical or virtual movement initiate a feedback loop that is self-sustaining, while the player’s struggle for control gives a shape or a purpose to this experience of free motion, thus prolonging it. In this perspective, the systems-oriented view of games is already a view that places kinetics – the study of “bodies in motion” – at the center of the definition of interactivity.

Kinetics is about ambulation: movement through space. Systems and spaces are surprisingly symmetrical concepts that allow different kinds of metaphorical transformations into each other; the popularity of using architectural terms to define software structure testifies to this.

Systems are defined by an operational terrain constituted by logical connectors that set up the permissibility of certain actions as opposed to others. Actions are open or closed depending on coextensive conditions articulated in discrete statements. In a similar way, spaces are built out of jointed negative and positive spaces that permit or restrict passage. Space has its own logical statements in connectors such as corridors, bridges, paths, conditional spaces such as balconies, mezzanines and rooftops, logic gates such as doors and windows. This makes the kinetics of a system and the kinetics of space strikingly similar.

Moreover, for the player / ambulator, navigation requires a certain prescience or foreknowledge about the system or space’s hidden topology. In negotiating a system a player struggles to acquire a degree of foresight in order to map out subsequent moves and plan ahead; correspondingly, the visitor of a space finds the view equally revealed and obstructed by her own singular perspective. Game studies scholar and designer Steffen P. Walz points to the interactivity inherent in spatial experience – an experience of point of view and obscured typology – in his discussion of architectural kinetics: “The way we move through a designed environment is responsible for our expectations of that environment. Thanks to material and immaterial emphases and the ordering of interior and exterior space, movement affects, shocks or surprises us, reveals secrets, and most importantly, asks us to actively participate in a space intellectually, physically, and relationally” (Walz 2010:30).

Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut: playtesting an installation

April 6th, 2010 project updatesTags: ambiance, architexture, experimental circus, haunted space, indexicality, material, photopia, visceral

shots from a playtest of my installation, Almost Everything Can And Shall Be Cut – a next iteration will involve layering the plastic sheeting to produce stereoscopic effects when the second channel video is projected. For the first video displayed on the monitor, I’m thinking of setting up the plastic tent in a stairwell.

Fischli and Weiss ” The Way Things Go”: inflatable and inflammable cause and effect

April 5th, 2010 researchTags: architexture, detournement, experimental circus, haptic, kinetic

The most hardcore of mouse-traps on a human scale, with various inflamable materials, ballons, liquid helium, fire, bubble, tires, mutilated furniture, using the principles of inertia, wheeling in symetrical patterns, explosion, aerodynamics, the centripedal and centrifugal forces and many others. More grungy, more dangerous, more punk rock than the famous recent “This Too Shall Pass” video by OK Go, looking back at an experimental classic.

TORUS: conceptualizing my installation for Burning Man 2010

March 24th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, architexture, body, city, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, maze, noise, play, utopia

Torus is a bouncing castle, an inflatable tunnel, a crawl space to rest and socialize, and a novel. After enjoying the buoyant properties of the platform at the center of the structure, revelers enter the darkly glowing, semi-translucent tunnel that circles the ring. Comfortably wide, and yet not large enough to allow you to stand up straight, the tunnel is a tautological maze that amusingly, gently disorients. Its elastic, squeaky walls have the consistency of a balloon and make for interesting reclining, lounging, splaying and contortion of limbs. Strangers meet as they crawl or wiggle through the tunnel: talk, experimentally intertwine, explore the space together. A system of fans keeps the air of the labyrinth adequately fresh and oxygenated.

The secret of Torus is in the speakers embedded in its walls: the tunnel is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant broadcasts a section of a short novel narrated by the novel’s protagonist. Like in one of Borges’ fantastical stories, the novel has neither beginning nor end – it is literally a circle!

The torus itself is a geometrical object with fascinating psychological properties…sound travels elliptically through it, allowing visitors to experience the ambiance rather than the letter of the novel.

A Photo Comic of my installation film: production stills from the shoot of Everything Can and Shall Be Cut

March 10th, 2010 project updatesTags: architexture, body, cyborg, experimental circus, haptic, inanimata, material, photopia, uncanny, visceral

Some stills from the shoot of one of the videos for my new installation “Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”

1. a balloon animal in a helpless position

2. the balloon animal in distress

3. a wig is powerless to keep the scissors at bay

4. the fate of the wig: stuffed in a blender

5. wig, ravaged , posing with its instrument of death

6. the slow decomposition of jello

7. the ice-cubes are handpicked for oblivion

8. a cube of polystyrene foam is tortured with a needle

9. green goo oozes from polystyrene’s wounds

10. a steak is posthumously fed with intraveinous liquid

11. a circuit board fears for its transistors

12. circuit board yields its last colorful breath

13. a pillow besides its own stuffing

14. exposing pillow’s inner flesh

15. the pink heart of pillow’s insides

ZIMOUN’s sound sculpture: most haunting murmur of elegant electronic objects

March 4th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, haunted space, inanimata, material, uncanny

Zimoun : Sound Sculptures & Installations | Compilation Video V1.6 from ZIMOUN VIDEO ARCHIVE on Vimeo.

Floating Donuts and Pink Pipe Joints: preliminary models for my project to hybridize the novel and the playground

February 25th, 2010 germinating ideasTags: ambiance, ambient narrative, architexture, body, Deleuze, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, maze, noise, novel, play, rhizome, space

These sketches are first steps towards a visualization of my concept of “ambient narrative”. In this case, the book being read is inscribed in the walls of a warren of floating inflatable tunnels (suspended like a octopus-shaped air mattress from a ceiling), in the form of pressure sensors that, depending on the visitor’s ensconcement in a particular branch of the structure, trigger audio recordings of a story. Each chapter of the book can be accessed in a recombinant rhizomatic way – literally the visitor travels through the story, using her body, its movements and its rubbing against the plush fabric of the tunnels, as the decoding instrument that allows her to gather fragments of the hidden text. The story itself, called “In the Dark: The Story of a Disapearance” is an existential mystery or detective novel that is pieced together by the non-linear meanderings of the reader.

“Almost Everything Can and Shall Be Cut”: my new installation project gets off the ground!

February 24th, 2010 project updatesTags: architexture, body, detournement, haunted space, inanimata, material, photopia, shock, uncanny, visceral

This two-channel installation piece examines the friction between texture and violence to bring us closer to the felt idea of flesh. The piece intends to question the relationship between affect and materiality, as well as the psychological economy of desire, destruction, and consumption by simultaneously making the viewer feel uncomfortable and viscerally involved.

Preliminary models:

A TV monitor presents us with a video of a hand performing different types of incisions using sharp and blunt metal instruments into a large array of materials. The monitor is covered with a loose “tent” of plastic sheeting, allowing the visitor a mysterious view of the video content through the blurring, glowing screen of the semi-transparent material. To get a closer look, the viewer has to unzip the tent’s opening and insert her head into an intimate space shared by the monitor.

The video is a loop of shot after shot of various texturally ambiguous materials or objects being clinically laid out on a chrome table while a hand, alternately gloved in vinyl or rubber gloves discovers the many methods by which each material can be cut up, destroyed, and divided and the specific instruments that do the job in the most satisfying or interesting way.

INCISION is preceded by a tactile prodding of the object followed by the MORCELLATION, FRAGMENTATION OF THE MATERIAL INTO ITS CONSTITUENT FORMS (filaments, bits, crumbs, slivers).The act of cutting can be smooth, swift : sensation of liberation, closure mixed with disquiet of violent end. The act of cutting can be difficult, messy, awkward: sensation of squeamish frustration. The viewer witnesses a Progression in the act of cutting: colorful liquid starts to OOZE out of the harmed materials (recalling old blood or water, displaying a viscous quality)

The second channel of the installation is rear projected onto a sheet of the same semi-transparent plastic wrapping that covered the monitor. The projection is a looping video of luridly colored organic textures (e.g. close-up of a beating heart, a time-lapse of growing mold). The video is processed into anaglyphic images to produce a stereoscopic effect, visible to the visitor with 3D glasses.

FUN FAIRS AS MEGALOMANIAC SCULPTURE GARDENS

February 9th, 2010 germinating ideas, researchTags: architexture, city, detournement, experimental circus, interactive, kinetic, play, space

Think of these rides as INTERACTIVE SCULPTURES : again, breaking down the false-ontological barriers between the cultural practices of high art and “low” entertainment. pop culture is the avant-garde !

Architexture VII: Peter Sarkisian and the spherical arcade

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, experimental circus, haptic, kinetic, machine, noise, play, uncanny

Peter Sarkisian, Extruded Video Engine n°=1. the impersonation of the arcade mentality! a new techno-animal emerges from this fizzing bleeping volumetric toy…

Peter Sarkisian at Volta NY
Uploaded by C-Monster. – Independent web videos.

Architexture VI: trampolines and mesh slides

February 9th, 2010 referencesTags: architecture, architexture, body, city, experimental circus, play

I like the idea of using fabric to transform the geometry of a space: multiplying the possibilities for interaction yet flexible, mobile and eminently adaptable to other architectures

Architecture turned into enjoyment and participation.
instead of contemplating the void of the guggenheim museum‘s central space,
JDS architects have proposed an experience which sees a trampoline net spiraling down
the institution’s rotunda. this idea plays on frank lloyd wright’s original scenography
for the guggenheim in which he envisioned patrons visiting the exhibition from the top,
downwards.

I Heart Tony Oursler: haunting heads

January 28th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, detournement, experimental circus, haunted space, inanimata, material, uncanny

using techniques pioneered by the imagineers for their Haunted Mansion ride? a real breakdown of the virtual/material barrier, we enter a liminal zone where the virtual animates objects, ensouling them…

Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation “The Watching” presented at Documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. “Judy”, 1993, explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media. “Get Away II” features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt direct address. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer’s sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical acclaim.

Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura. In his text “Time Stream”, Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler’s interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Art Angel commissioned the “Influence Machine” in 2000. This installation marks the artist’s first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Park NYC and Soho Square London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona including “Braincast” at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria New York.

(source: Wikipedia)

The Playground as Art Practice: Kinesthetic Art II

January 28th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, espace heureux, experimental circus, kinetic, play, space

note how the documentation is edited to techno! The correlation with dance culture is a phenomenological one.

Architexture V / soundsuits by NICK CAVE: a fashion of impossible subjectivities

January 25th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, detournement, experimental circus, inanimata, music, play

Fowler Museum presents ‘Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,’ Jan 10–May 30, 2010

Exhibition features 35 of artist’s ‘Soundsuits,’ wearable mixed-media sculptures

By Stacey Ravel Abarbanel October 23, 2009

“Whether Nick Cave’s efforts qualify as fashion, body art or sculpture … they fall squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed.” —Roberta Smith, New York Times

“Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,” on display at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from Jan. 10 through May 30, 2010, is the largest presentation of work by the Chicago-based artist, featuring 35 of his “Soundsuits” — multilayered, mixed-media sculptures named for the sounds made when the “suits” are performed.

Evocative of African, Caribbean and other ceremonial ensembles, as well as haute couture, Cave’s work explores issues of transformation, ritual, myth and identity through a layering of references and virtuosic construction, using materials as varied as yarn, beads, sequins, bottle caps, vintage toys, rusted iron sticks, twigs, leaves and hair.

Mad, humorous, visionary, glamorous and unexpected, the Soundsuits are created from scavenged, ordinary materials and objects from both nature and culture, which Cave recontextualizes into extraordinary works of art. The Fowler is the first Los Angeles–area museum to feature Cave’s work and the only Southern California venue for this traveling exhibition.

The Fowler presentation of this exhibition holds particular meaning for the artist and for Los Angeles because Cave’s first Soundsuit was sparked by the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating.

The Soundsuits almost always cover the whole body, erasing the identity of the wearer. Thus, the Soundsuits can be understood as coats of armor, shielding Cave from the day-to-day prejudice he encounters as an African American man and facilitating a transformation into an invented realm of vibrant associations and meanings.

For this exhibition, Cave also employs animal imagery in ways as complex and multilayered as the human-based suits. While conjuring the spiritual strength and power of animal totems used in ancient rituals from around the world, Cave’s Soundsuits also become vessels of transformation and seek to connect us to the Earth and the animals around us. Using wit, humor and a fanciful sensibility, Cave’s Soundsuits beg us to pay attention and to dream of a different future.

Nick Cave received his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1982 and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. He studied fiber art but is committed to a broad spectrum of interests and disciplines. Cave is an associate professor and chairman of the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches in the fiber arts program. He has led such workshops as “Extending the Body: Experiments in Clothing” and has designed, manufactured and marketed his own line of men’s and women’s clothing. He has received numerous awards, including a United States Artists Fellowship (2006) and a Joyce Award (2006), and his work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe.

Kinesthetic Art: spatial vocabulary and the body ego

January 20th, 2010 researchTags: ambiance, architexture, body, experimental circus, haptic, immersion, inanimata, play, space, time, visceral

Matthew Barney, Cremaster I

text: Margaret Morse, Video installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between

Morse evokes a piece by Muntadas called haute CULTURE Part I, in which two monitors are placed on each end of a seesaw, thereby making an elegant point, couched in physical terms (physical even as in “physics”, since gravity is employed as an artistic device) about the act of comparing both sets of images. This piece offers an example of what Morse calls “kinesthetic” learning, or the kind of information processing and intuition specific to our perception of the organization of objects in space. Kinesthetic perception is synesthetic and active – it involves visuality, sound, and the haptic in a way that allows each sensorial input to complement, suffuse and correspond to another, and using the entire body, including its own position in space relative to other objects, as a sensory organ. The kinesthetic subject is always hyper-aware of her body/herself as key element in the epistemological puzzle posed by the installation piece: all the meaning that can be gleaned from a space must bounce off of her, her critical interpretation changes and accrues only according to her own changing orientation in space. This unfolding signification is also temporally grounded – in fact kinesthetic appreciation can be defined as a temporalized experience of space, a strange, subliminal experience in which we both critically stand outside ourselves to consider ourselves-within-the-world and have an acute consciousness of inhabiting our bodies, of being materially and psychically connected to the outside world. Morse’s term of “body ego” encapsulates this awareness of oneself as an entity, something that participates in both the object and the subject.

Going back to Muntadas’ seesaw, we can see how the artist’s physical demonstration of a conceptual relationship between the two objects/monitors offers us a uniquely visceral insight into an a priori realm of abstract and critical thought. The kinesthetic argument being made is playful – an analogy more than a declaration. Using the evocative power of objects and their wealth of cultural denotations, an artist can articulate kinesthetic phrases, in which different objects constitute a semantic content and their relative positions (taking into account the multiple trajectories of the visitor) operate as syntax. Objects are further mis-en-abime within the virtual windows of screens and video channels – kinesthetic art erases to a certain degree the ontological difference between what is represented (screen-based) and what is presented (anchored in physical space). The resulting aesthetic and epistemological experience is intuitive and multidimensional, blurring the boundaries between thinking and feeling.

Photopia or Architexture IV: candied death by Michael Hussar

January 10th, 2010 referencesTags: architexture, body, cyborg, experimental circus, photopia, uncanny, visceral

Is it candy, jewels, or blood? Skin, froth, mother of pearl, or cream? eyes deadened by narcotics, faces decomposing and yet fluffy with sweet, fresh flesh. Michael Hussar puts the texture back in the visual art, using impressionist techniques to create nauseating and irresistible allegories of desire, decay and sugar. Lovably tactile: sticky, soft, smooth, liquid, ticklish,and with the occasionally sharp claw or tooth to remind us of pain.

Experimental Circus: Burning Man 2010 (Metropolis)!

December 20th, 2009 researchTags: architexture, city, experimental circus, haptic, haunted space, immersion, play, time, utopia

For those interested in interactivity not only as an art or industry practice but as a way of life and social experiment, Burning Man remains a visionary site where specifically space, in Lefevrian fashion treated as a shaper of social and cultural context rather than background, is radically explored and expressed. Taking its cue from the Situationists and their idea of a playful “psychogeographic” city, Burning Man is fun fair, ginormous art installation, multimedia playground, slum-mushroom, Fourrierian commune where the consequences of extremely minimal legislation (including a prohibition against the use of money) allow you to live the anarchist American dream.

If you could do exactly what you wanted to invest your time in, and give it some kind of physical form, what would you chose to do? This is the question answered by Burners…often giving rise to habitats, zones, and contraptions that you would only see in the virtual realms of computer games or from the sets of fantasy and science fictions movies. Loose in time, without any schedule (divorced from leisure and encouraged to participate), revelers spend it being in and feeling the weirdness and possibilities of space. From this radical redefinition of these basic parameters, sociality starts to mutate beyond recognition…

The theme for 2010 is METROPOLIS. I would think unavoidable research for anyone interested in dreams of future cities! “Every year a dense metropolis arises in the Black Rock Desert; every year it disappears without a trace. Tumult and change, churning cycles of invention and destruction – these forces generate the pulse of urban life. Great cities are organic, spontaneous, heterogeneous, and untidy. They are, like Burning Man, magnetic hubs of social interaction. This year’s theme will function as a micro and a macro-scope, an instrument through which we will inspect the daily course of city life and the future prospect of what we call civilization.”

Cinema in a Cabinet

October 26th, 2009 germinating ideasTags: architexture, haunted space, immersion, photopia, screen, visceral

a solution to the screen vs. physical space dichotomy: merging two different ontologies of immersive space. You need to enter a secret space within the larger installation to look at the screen: watch a movie in a closet, a cabinet, then crawl out/emerge.