Mediated Spaces - MSc Architecture
The social habits for an architecture as media are already existing with the use of mobile phones, Internet, and so on. This condition makes these issues relevant for architects, looking into how material qualities can be extended through media and how this can mediate local spaces to distant spaces.
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The perceived reality
“What we perceive as reality is a tiny detail from the field of possibilities surging around us, which our nervous system has realized through computation. If all reality is a computation from possibilities, then “reality” is a threshold value”
[Vilém Flusser]
Electronic media saturate our cultural environment, so influence our perceived reality(1). Think about how many things you have seen for real, and how many on images and film. Today, it becomes unavoidable for architects to look at these issues more carefully.
I wanted to start from scratch, to test new possibilities for real, asking what new architecture could arise from our rapidly developing environment.
For this reason, I have decided not to draw plans and sections, as in a regular architecture project using representational methods, but to build prototypes, in a 1 to 1 scale, that are testing the possibilities of blurring the electronic media into the physical space.
Building functioning installations instead of drawing plans and sections, requires different resources in knowledge and materials. I have acted throughout the project as a “plugin” or parasite with my specific interests, and was traveling through a set of events and platforms, ranging from academic to commercial and cultural. This allowed me to collaborate with people having various backgrounds, from different disciplines. For this, specific credits are carefully noted at each prototype.
Method of research
The project is highly influenced by ideas from complexity science(2). I wanted it to develop into a network of connected parts, rather than a main result, a singular outcome. This system of seven prototypes in the end, is communicating via the underlying concepts, through the designer-mediator.
The project was developed in a distant working collaboration over the Internet with Kerstin Nigsch from TU Vienna architecture. Using an online library called reBrain (http://www.arch.kth.se/eurb/rebrain/) made it possible to keep track of each others progress and invite others to read and interact with the project.
As a general concept, I am trying to give physical qualities to mediated experiences and mediate physical environments, to blur the threshold in-between. To make this more clear, I would like to briefly introduce four of the Prototypes.
Architecture as media
The social habits for an architecture as media are already existing with the use of mobile phones, Internet, and so on. This condition makes these issues relevant for architects, looking into how material qualities can be extended through media and how this can mediate local spaces to distant spaces.
The seven prototypes
The project is carried out through the making of seven instrumental prototypes, that are testing concepts and experiences in a 1 to 1 scale, and are forming a rhizomatic system, informing each other back and forth. The method has been re-appropriating already existing concepts and technology in a playful way to breed new experiences. These prototypes are:
Satellite Algorithms
Spaces of algorithmic motion are linked to physical devices. Media: 21Kb, Flash, Electrograph, Sound
Screen Threshold
Giving physical qualities to a mediated entity, blurring the threshold. Media: 50*50 cm, 41Kb, Flash, CRT Screen, Deconstructed Mouse, Magnetism, Wind
Backpack Dance
Biofeedback instrument mediating music to dance. 20 testers personal behavior documented. Media: Gives physical qualities to music 30*50 cm, 6Kb, Music, icrocontroller, Radio, People
Installation for Learning Lab
Taking the backpack experience to a communal level. Media: 80 m2, 200Mb, Sound showers, lights, Kodály hand signs, solmization
The Responsive Octopus
Informing a virtual space with qualities of a physical model. Media: 40Kb, Steel, Flash
Remote Home Prototype
Mediation of two small architectural spaces. Compound of previous ideas on a communal level. Media: 20m2, 4000Kb, Flash, Mouse, Keyboard, Projection, Sound, Milk, Fabric, Steel, Aluminum
Memory Scan
Mediation of a cultural space. Media: 150 m2, Computers, Keyboards
