By Alexander Wilson and Karmen Franinovic

Reconfigurable Architecture by Alexander Wilson and Karmen Franinovic

Our movement produces space : as we walk through the streets we spatialize the city through kinesthetic body rhythms [1]. However, our movements are limited, directed and guided by spatial design of urban surroundings. Walls direct our movements of body, values conduct our movements of thought. Can we collectively reconstruct this space of urban flows? Can we direct and redirect people moving through their established paths? Can we harness the flow and create monadic zones of intensity in the city?

In this project, urban space is waiting to be moved and produced by its citizens, who play with the spatial and bodily relations between themselves, others and the environment in transformation. Rather than supporting the idea of built architectures as given, immutable structures, this project enables citizens to arrange and re-arrange the physical and intangible elements of urban space. By moving the hinge-screen, at once a doorway and a wall, a connector and a separator, the participant can articulate and redistribute the urban flows of inertia. In this way they modify the existing established uses of the public space and create their own experience of an urban area. An incessantly changing public space is produced. In it, no motion is automatic, but every movement is echoed by the responsive environment. The movements of boundaries do not only enclose or open the space, they enable sounds, lights, colors and shadows that intensify space and produce new sensorial atmospheres. Each hinge-screen is a singular articulation of potential movement, but its rotation also modulates light and video media projected back into the created spatial arrangements, accentuating expansion and contractions of a collaboratively built spatial experience. Citizens co-inhabit and co-structure previously non-existent architectures, the result of their engagement with visible and invisible flows.

We plan to collaborate with dancers from essexdance, and have this system be creatively used as an environment for an architectural choreography. Their collaboration is essential for the exploration and understanding of the possibilities of this augmented public space. In addition thee dancers may help introduce the public to this responsive kinetic environment, engaging them in playful interactions. Our hope is that the system may be used by both dancers and by the general public, bringing the two groups together.

[1] M. de Certeau. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U California Press.

Technical Description:

-Each hinge-screen consists of a metal post, erected vertically, which acts as a 360 degree pivot point for a large rectangular screen of fabric, itself mounted on a metal frame.

-Since each post is placed one screen-span away from its neighboring posts, the screens can be swivelled by the user and connected in line or at right angles to each other to form continuous surfaces, creating a wide variety of rooms and corridors. This labyrinth is multiple labyrinths (Ariadne's thread would be of little use).

-Each hinge-screen contains a rotary encoder which encodes the direction the screen is facing at all times, and this data is sent back to a central computer for processing.

-The computer interprets the data of the rotation and position of the hinge-screens to recreate an informatic model of the topology the users have collectively created with the space. Where are the exits? How many are there? Where are the dead ends? Which kinds of movement does the current space encourage/discourage. How are the users playing with the rotation of these screens: are they working together to build coherent architectures? This data is used to generate both the sonic and visual aspects of the environment.

-Colored light and visuals are projected from a very bright data projector onto the cieling of the envoirnoment at night.

-A system of bright LEDs is used inside the installation- to change the internal colors of the space.

-A generative sound composition is spatialized and sequenced algorithmically, according to the topologies the users coproduce in the space. The multi-channel audio is sent back to speakers installed in the bases of each hinge-screen, creating a heterogeneous and disorienting sonic landscape.

POSSIBLE LOCATION FOR PROJECT INSTALATION/PERFORMANCE:

Any pedestrian street, public square or the street (that could be closed to automobile traffic during the installation). Passage through the installation must be the only way through the public area, such as in front of the main access to an important building, or across an entire pedestrian walkway. We imagine this space as an urban gap which channels the linear movement typical of the street into a labyrinthic flow. The street should be wide enough to enable us to create this labyrinthic environment, minimum 8 meters squared, ideally 16 meters squared. We would also require the ability to install a video projector from the adjacent buildings. Public access to at least one of the spaces inside the adjacent buildings would be preferable.

ARTISTIC MOTIVATION

This project engages the citizens with the tensions and constraints of built urban environment. We want to inspire people to engage with the spaces they live in and to realize how spatial structures direct and conduct their movements in every day life. We also want to show that interactive technologies, when creatively applied to the domain of physical encounters, can help qualitatively change the relations between citizen and state. Physical interaction brings us in direct contact with the world, making public issues and shared responsibility tangible. Direct encounters and interaction with urban inertias, challenge not only established spatial practices, but sedimented behavior structures and social relations as well. By moving the focus from passive use and consumption of public space and social values, to modes of active transformation of the information/matter of which urban space is composed, we mobilize the city on the molecular level.

The result is an in-between space of encounters, a hinge dimension of articularion, a public space in which pluralities meet, powers shift and act together recombined. Rather than promoting the city as a space for statements (such as vote or demonstration), interactivity helps us transform representational spaces into active urban events. To abandon representation means to challenge powers and identities, and to promote collective transformation of reality. The experience of the audience changes from one of passive exposure to one of active engagement and co-creation of the artistic content. Values are not directly addressed in the artwork: they emerge from the sensorial and social ecologies it enables.