Introduction
Alice in Technoland At their most supernatural, interactive design environments can have a transformative effect. They take the visitor to somewhere else. By actively involving the public they are both ‘porous’ and ‘responsive’, beckoning us like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland to enter and participate in another world. Here Lucy Bullivant kicks off her introduction to this issue of AD by looking at an installation designed by Daan Roosegaarde for the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam which epitomises this approach.
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‘We want it to learn how to behave and to become more sensitive towards the visitor,’ says Dutch architect Daan Roosegaarde of his new interactive landscape, Dune 4.0. The installation consisted of two long ‘bushes’ of swaying, reedlike fibres fitted with microphones and presence sensors that recently lined a corridor of the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. ‘There are several moods within the landscape; when nobody is there, it will fall asleep – glooming softly – but then as soon as you enter, light appears where you walk, as an extension of your activities,’ he explains. ‘When you make a lot of noise the landscape goes crazy – lightning crashes.’ Interactive design environments like Dune 4.0 promote the personalisation and customisation of not just architecture, but also of their wider physical public contexts. They assert an architecture of social relations that invites the visitor to spontaneously perform and thereby construct alternative physical, architectural, urban and social meanings. This is facilitated by the multidisciplinary ability and teamwork architects, artists and designers increasingly apply to program spaces, turning the traditional concept of ephemerality as a nature-based phenomenon into something supernatural. Through the activation of embedded, custom-designed software and responses to its effects, the identity of public space itself goes beyond its constitution through generic formal givens, and becomes porous and responsive to specific information and communication conveyed to it. The installation of Dune 4.0 in the Media Art Institute is a pilot:
Studio Roosegaarde, Dune 4.0, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, and CBK Rotterdam, 2006–07 The initial pilot made of fibres with concealed microphones and sensors reacts to the behaviour of visitors, its fibres lighting up in response to their sounds (30 per cent) and movements (70 per cent). A continual stimulus will after time be ignored so the work stays fresh for new human input. Another version is being planned for installation in a public place on a dyke by the River Maas in Rotterdam. Software designed with Peter de Maan, digital technology with Axis + Stuifmeel.
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UVA, Volume, V&A, 2006–07 In this LED grid of 46 columns, each of which plays its own piece of music, the notes generate changing colours in real time. UVA designed the installation to work well as an experience on different scales: with no people, with one person, with less than 10 and with much larger numbers of people. They avoided determining colour according to visitor density and struck a balance between pure responsivity and controlled composition. Each visitor entered into a personal exploration of the installation, and their actions influenced others, and this was fundamental to the work, with people regularly switched from viewing to participating.
the next stage takes an evolved version of this adaptive ‘bush’ outdoors on to a dyke beside the River Maas in Rotterdam, where it will be a future public artwork for the municipality. Apart from the more convincing fake nature associations possible, one of the appealing features of many interactive environments is their anthropomorphic qualities. Roosegaarde could easily be describing a pet or even a wild animal in captivity. One day he found an old lady testing Dune 4.0’s sounds by barking at it. She told him she was trying to see if it would respond like her dog at home did. It is the behavioural aspects – the unpredictable, ‘live’ quality of installations – that is compelling and with the active involvement of visitors ‘completes’ the identity of the work.
The growing appetite of museums and galleries to focus on interactive installations created by artists, architects, designers and other practitioners enables a range of responsive technological applications – for instance, proximity sensing – to be evolved through public use, and even tested out in what is an ideal, controlled setting with a variety of types of visitor. Roosegaarde usefully typifies the materials and the context as the ‘hard construction’, and the software and the human behaviour as the ‘soft construction’. But while creating a Pavlov’s Dog cybernetic model would be repetitive, a certain pattern of responsivity to the subject would seem to be more important than a work exhibiting consistent waywardness. Ultimately, each installation is a prosthetic device for human creativity, whether or not one agrees that this also opens it up to the interpretation of ‘playing God’. By involving visitors and passers-by so intimately in an installation’s responsive ‘operating system’, they too become part of the prosthetic impact, and the public space it occupies becomes, for a limited time, prosthetic, too. Roosegaarde emulates nature in a number of his works and, like an implanted field of bulrushes, Dune 4.0 has the capacity to become a new layer over the existing architecture and merging its intelligent
qualities in an ongoing game with the actively involved human body, it is hoped, avoids becoming predictable. Works like Dune 4.0 could be perceived as a kind of second nature, interventions that make their entire environmental setting supernatural, like ‘Alice in Technoland’, to use Roosegaarde’s phrase describing the effect of his installation. There are undoubtedly analogies with the Victorian children’s story set in a fantasy realm, its unfolding narrative full of riddles and plays on meaning. In interactive environments, as in Alice in Wonderland, cultural codes are fluid, and function is defined as a more open-ended concept influenced by in-the-moment behaviour. This makes them potent curatorial devices in a museum context, where handhelds are already common, but works on display to be touched and played with are rare. The cultural transformations digital technologies bring to traditional associations of a museum space are discussed in ‘Playing with Art’ in this issue. UVA’s Volume, installed in the courtyard of the V&A last autumn, broke the customarily reserved, contemplative atmosphere of the museum. An interactive pavilion in an open garden setting that visitors could touch, push on and run through, it became, albeit temporarily, their space, perhaps a form of physical parallel to the many user-generated content sites such as MySpace proliferating daily on the Internet. The growing appetite of museums and galleries to focus on interactive installations created by artists, architects, designers and other practitioners enables a range of responsive technological applications – for instance, proximity sensing – to be evolved through public use, and even tested out in what is an ideal, controlled setting with a variety of types of visitor. Paris-based designers Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen of HeHe did this when they built a prototype of their Mirrorspace project for remote communication, originally conceived for the interLiving project of the European Disappearing Computer initiative (2001–03) focused on communication among family members in different households. Taking the Mains d’Oeuvres gallery, the Pompidou Centre and later La Villette, all in Paris, as their venues throughout 2003, they hoped to prove that the work created a sense of shared space, overcoming the failure of many video-mediated communication systems to take proxemics into account by being designed for a specific task or a certain interpersonal distance. As HeHe point out, artists like Dan Graham already use time-delay mechanisms in mirror-based installations to let viewers see themselves as both subject and object.1 By presenting Mirrorspace to a broad mix of gallery visitors, HeHe found friends and relatives freely overlaying their faces on the surface, and even kissing each other. Pursuing their design-led agenda, they were able to conclude that their mirror was an ideal enabling metaphor for a new communication system. Testing showed that it was perceived at this level rather than as a video camera set up on a wall. After the exercise, the design, and the software and hardware
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HeHe, Mirrorspace, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2003 Enabling remote participants to look into each other’s eyes, the work has a screen and a mini camera at its centre. This setup is repeated in a second installation, so people who look into the mirror can communicate with each other. An ultrasonic sensor calculates the physical distance that separates the spectators and, depending on how far away they are, will blur the images returned in real time. The two reflections are blended together on the surface of the mirrors, transforming the visual contact between two people and altering the space between them.
From peripheral awareness to close communication by moving towards the device.
of the device, which was connectable to similar ones in other places, could then continue to be evolved. This common interest in user-generated input, personalisation and dynamic relations between action, space and object is shared with practitioners across various sectors including designers of wearable computing (discussed by Despina Papadopoulos in this issue), but for some artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Scott Snibbe, Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu, all of whose work is profiled in this publication by Maria Fernández and myself, a projection takes the place of an object. In contrast to visual art media that privilege the visual, interactive environments engage the visitor’s body and assert his or her agency. In Lozano-Hemmer and Schuldenfrei and Yiu’s case, although working with different social agendas, a common objective is to transform the dominant narratives of a specific building or urban setting by superimposing new audiovisual elements that recontextualise it. Snibbe invites visitors to turn the orthodoxy of linear cinema narration into a more organic interface between subject and object. This prosthetic capacity of interactive architecture in its more design-oriented tendency can be assigned a range of innovative social roles. It may take on the form of social infrastructure, a feature typified by Flirtables, designs currently in development by Tobi Schneidler (as featured in AD 4dspace: Interactive Architecture, 2005). Social networking tables, intended to be assembled in a group in bars and clubs, their dimmable light surfaces contain a sensor that picks up vibrations and responds to music. Knock them with the hand and a glowing streak of light is propelled across the table. With a stronger blow it jumps to another table, but can also be specifically aimed in the direction of another individual sitting at one of the tables. This is the unique selling proposition of Flirtables: the movement of light is a social icebreaker to attract the attention of someone nearby you don’t know but want to meet. For metropolitan centres like London or Stockholm where inhibitions make engineering meetings with strangers a fraught process, and singles bars are felt to possess a definite stigma, this introduces a playful new socio-spatial programme for a bar or club likely to be eagerly explored. The concept seems adaptable for other scenarios, such as informal learning environments in museums that utilise play as a means to educational involvement. As an inventor of commercially viable design solutions straddling art and commerce, Schneidler has a kinship with other practitioners such as Jason Bruges in the UK, Scott Snibbe’s Sona Research and Antenna Design in the US, the Interaction Design Lab in Italy and Daan Roosegaarde’s studio in the Netherlands. Frequently adopting a laboratory-like working environment, practitioners pull together multidisciplinary teams for the research and prototyping of new concepts for widespread use in various public domains. Industry backing is clearly beginning to grow, with a more intimate public awareness being engendered by innovative initiatives of specific cultural sectors like museums and
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Mirrorspace installed on an advertising hoarding in the street, showing two participants looking into each other’s faces and the image sensors in the centre.
galleries. In the last 15 years these have moved away from hermetic, immersive ‘black box’ or kiosk models of digital spaces into ones that colonise and adapt the public spaces of these cultural places of learning on many levels. The methodologies of interactive architecture are heavily borrowed by architects, artists and designers from interactive media art, and this process continues. But as Mark Garcia’s showcasing of some new examples in this issue underlines, the field continues to evolve its own hybrid identity as solutions that are innovative in artistic, behavioural and technological terms are developed for different sectors. In an era of pervasive computing we need to think further about how humans, devices and their shared environments might coexist in a mutually constructive environment. Everyday buildings are embedded with tracking technologies that watch people. The ubiquitous presence in the environment of an invisible web of electronic activity in the form of surveillance systems, but also a wide range of electromagnetic sensitivities, can be harnessed to change people’s relationships with space. As Hugh Hart’s feature on the Los Angeles-based architectural practice Electroland illuminates, they can also illicit a further feeling of ambiguity about what is happening in a positive sense, by building in customdesigned systems of responsivity that intercept occupants
and visitors and invite them to play, co-opting the tracking function of digital technologies, and turning ordinary spaces into ‘stealth’ art venues. The recent full-blown evolution in interactive environment methods and means brings the need to explore the words used to describe aspects of this practice and examine the provocative counterpoints to their uses. Considering interactive architecture as an architecture of social relations and effects, it is vital to distinguish between ‘interactive’, ‘reactive’ and ‘responsive’, and to understand the evolution of theories of interaction and the interdisciplinary subject of cybernetics, the study of control and communication in goaldriven systems in animals and machines. In his two articles in this issue, Usman Haque provides both a personal lexical guide to interactive art and architecture, and an assessment of the contemporary relevance to the field of Gordon Pask, one of the early proponents and practitioners of cybernetics, whose work set the foundation for authentically interactive environments. Pask’s concept of Conversation Theory, a generative activity that gives identity to participants and leads to what is new, put cybernetics into a conversational frame depicted in his ‘Architecture of conversations’ sketches, rather than being merely a matter of communication, exchanging messages containing what is already known. His intellectual
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Antenna Design, The Door, Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis, 2000 For their commission to feature over 40 Web-based art projects, Antenna turned the solitary, ‘any time, anywhere’ Web experience into one that was ‘here and now’, requiring the visitor to physically perform in order to get results. They created a physical portal, referring to the portal metaphor of Web design, in the form of a freestanding revolving door that enabled visitors to navigate various websites simply by rotating it. When it is not used, it is a mirror-surface monolith; on pushing it, a door bell sounds, indicating that the visitor is entering a new website, which appears on the other side of the mirrored glass. The visitor can continue to interact with it via a trackpad integrated into the door handle, or continue spinning to visit the rest of the sites.
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Usman Haque, Moody Mushroom Floor, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, 1996 This early work of Haque’s was a field of anthropomorphically defined ‘mushrooms’ that developed a range of moods and aspirations in response to the ways in which visitors reacted to their outputs in the form of different lights, sounds and smells emitted at intervals. Assigned pet names including ‘spoilt brat’, ‘sullen’ and ‘capricious’, the responsive mushrooms tested out a range of behaviours on visitors to try to achieve their individual goal before settling on the most effective one matching their ascribed ‘personality’.
frameworks and prototypes centralised the subjectivity of the observer and his or her individual knowledge within any form of scientific analysis. His work made it easy, for instance, according to Pask expert Paul Pangaro, to write software that nurtured individual learning styles. ‘Increasingly, the personality of artefacts, whether objects or environments, is made up not only of appearance and materials, but also of behaviour,’ say Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger of Antenna, the New York City-based designers. Their interactive work, ranging from public information resources (their Civic Exchange installation is discussed later in this issue), subway ticket machines, window displays and gallery installations, crosses the now no longer solid threshold between product and environment, public and private, physical and digital interfaces, and has a strong prototypical element to it. In responding to deep sociocultural and technological changes, only a broad inclusive approach and capacity to invent new programmes,
something 4dsocial celebrates, will do if these transformations are to be creatively interpreted in a way that opens up the civic potential of public space in a postindustrial, digital era. The promise of our evolving supernatural facilities – thanks to a myriad imaginative prosthetic applications of digital technologies – demands that creative practitioners fully involve people in their development on both subjective and objective levels, enabling them to make their own connections between what are increasingly permeable cultural thresholds of perception and being. 4 Note 1. Nicolas Roussel, Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, ‘Proximity as an Interface for Video Communication’, IEEE Multimedia paper published by the IEEE Computer Society, 2003. Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6-7 © Daan Roosegaarde; p 8 © United Visual Artists; pp 10-11 © Helen Evans + Heiko Hansen, HeHe Association; p 12 © Antenna Design New York Inc; p 13 © Usman Haque
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