Editorial Prototype_ Media Architecture by Joyce Zhu

INTERFACE Journal of Media Architecture Volume 01 May 20

INTERFACE is a student-run architecture journal based on the course of ABPL90368 Architecture and Media in the Melbourne School of Design. The Journal focuses on the topic of Media Architecture and initiates activities linking industry, education and academia together. It is a space to create ideas, share opinions, raise issues about the future form of architecture.

Editor: Joyce Danqing Zhu 1032747 Academic Adivisor: Dr. AnnMarie Brennan Acknowledgements: The editor would like to tbank all the members of the course ABPL90368 Architecture and Media who positively engage and provide feedbacks of this journal.

For requests about the journal or media architecture please contact: ask@interfacemsd.org For applications to join in our team please contact: danqing1@student.unimelb.edu.au Interfacemsd.com facebook.com/interfacemsd/ instagram.com/interfacemsd.com Postal address: University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010, Australia

© 2021 Joyce Danqing Zhu. All rights reserved. ISSN 0000-0000 ISBN 000-0-00000-000-0 No part of the work must in any mode (print, photoopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor - by application of electronic systems - processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

Cover Image: Graphic Design by Joyce Danqing Zhu 1032747

CONTENTS

Contributors

Editorial Joyce Danqing Zhu

Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space

Behind ‘Urban Screen Productions’

‘We as Artists Need to Intervene.’

Lubi Thomas

Scott McQuire

Media Facades - History, Technology, Content

Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Matthias Hank Haeusler

New Media Facades: A Global Survey Martin Tomitsch

The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media

On the Design of Interactive Media Architecture for Public Environment Marius Hoggenmüller

Dave Robert Colangelo

Media Architecture - An Entrance to Hybrid Space

What If Buildings Could See?

Up into the Unknown

Jason Bruges

Zhigang Chang

Interview with Peter Cook

CONTRIBUTORS Scott McQuire

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Matthias Hank Haeusler

Dave Robert Colangelo

Martin Tomitsch

Marius Hoggenmüller

Zhigang Chang

Jason Bruges

Lubi Thomas

Peter Cook

Scott Mcquire is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He is one of the founders of the Research Unit for Public Cultures which fosters interdisciplinary research at the nexus of digital media, contemporary art, urbanism, and social theory. He explores the nature of modern city which is wrapped up by digital media and commodification and has a research background of studying the social effects of media technology, with its impact on social relations in time and space.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an electronic artist in the field of architecture, technological theatre and performance. His artworks are related to public participation and represents the micro politics of interaction, somehow on the border of ‘Orwellian’ style. The two typical work are Body Movies and Airborne Projection.

Matthias Hank Haeusler is the founding member of the Media Architecture Institute (MAI) as well as the discipline director of Built Environment in University of New South Wales. Hank Haeusler demonstrates high interest on the potentials of media envelope on buildings. He redefines the historical origin of media architecture and believes media architecture has shifted from displaying signs to rebuilding itself. He conducts his research through practices and exhibits several prototypes at public events like Hypersurface Architecture.

Dave Robert Colangelo is an Assistant Professor of Digital Creation and Communication at Ryerson University. He is the founding member of Public Visualization Studio. He investigates the conflux of exhibition-making, public art and urban experience and critically explores the relationship between the identity and notions of space with media screens.

Martin Tomitsch is also a founding member of the Media Architecture Institute as well as a professor in the Design Lab at the University of Sydney. He has rich teaching experience in the interdisciplinary of interaction design, design innovation and smart cities. His research focused on the role of design for interacting between people and technology as well as building sustainablity.

Marius Hoggenmüller is a Sydney based Interaction Designer working in the field of Media Architecture. He is speciliazed in using prototyping methods and tools for complex design contexts using both physical and digital materials. One of Marius Hoggenmüller’s focus is on low-resolution lighting displays on building facades, which features in a complex pixel or three-dimensional shape patterns. He also focuses on the creation and representation of content, and treats lighting design as a material and technological process.

Zhigang Chang is the Professor and vice dean at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He sets his sights on lighting design and architecture design. He proposed the concept of the media facade as the ‘Third Screen’, contributing to an interactive environment. The key to activate ‘the third screen’ is through artistic intervention plus the application of data collection, which can also be interpreted as the publicity of light and digitization of light. From this standpoint, Chang believes, “In the past, architectural changes were all about architects or artists. Today, lighting is at the forefront of this architectural revolution, so the next architectural revolution may be initiated by lighting designers.’

Jason Bruges is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in London. He is one of the pioneers of the hybrid space between art, architecture and technology. His work is site -specific and full of dynamism, which blends architecture with interaction design to evoke the spatial experience of the public space. The two typical projects are Showtime and Shadow Wall.

Lubi Thomas is an Experienced curator in the fields of digital media arts and related programs. She has developed and engaged comprehensive programs of exhibitions, projects and festival events, like The Cube Brisbane, Urban Screen Productions and Experimenta. She collaborates with artists and creative technologist to create cultural expetiences tightly related to the context for the audiences, locally and internationally.

INTERFACE

Journal of Media Architecture

Peter Cook is the founder of Archigram. He is the senior fellow of the Royal College of Art in London as well as the Former Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), London, and Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London). Peter Cook together with Colin Fournier is the designer of Kunsthaus Graz, which is regarded as one of the first buildings to incorporate new media to the facade.

Volume 01

Contributors

EDITORIAL Natural Light

Joyce Danqing Zhu

Why?

The urban environment has long been seen as an interactive platform for the public. While building façade as a vertical interface in the city sculpts how we perceived the surroundings. Architecture has the nature of communication, thus they are always intentionally strengthened and portrayed beyond the overall building to convey information and meanings of its environment. In a broader sense, architecture is media. From the Middle Ages to the present, with the development of information, methodology and tools, medialized architecture has been inflexed with different topics.

In modern days, the light threshold in cities has been refreshed. The architectural façade has been covered by textual advertisement and photoelectric images as the secondary contour. It meets the needs of business interest but also somehow regarded as light pollution for the public. While the mainstream orthodox architectural disciplines also do not accept the study on media screens as part of architecture. One reason is the embodiment of consumerism culture and commercial vulgarization. Another reason is that the practice of media architecture is limited to the architectural surface, which is detached from the building and its context. McLunham points out that the reason why electro-optical media on architecture has not attracted people’s attention is precisely because it has no content but sits on the hidden technical framework.1

Historical Clues: The emphasis turns from natural light to artificial light, from static sculptures and drawings presenting eternal values to dynamic images which re-sculpts the perceptual environment in modern days. (See Figure) From the narrative perspective, in Gothic architecture, communication was established symbolically and led by authority. In the Renaissance, it permeated in urban architecture and reflected on the structural decoration like colonnades and arcades, representing the power of the institutions or individuals. With the development of the industrial revolution, mechanical production led to mechanized design. From here, the external symbolism of the building skin and the building form are transformed from linked state to a detached state. The dissemination of information had also been accelerated and simplified, giving birth to the spread of graphic design and the form of advertising buildings. In postmodernism, the pure architectural experience in the city has been mixed with photoelectric signs, which points to a media city with light buildings as a symbol of consumerism. (See Figure) In all periods, architecture can be regarded as a declarative symbol to reflect the times. Under the media façade flooded by electronic screens today, there is a world controlled by images.

INTERFACE

Artificial Light

Moulins Cathedral (16c)

Kunsthaus Graz (2003)

External symbolism of the building & The form of the building Tightly linked

From another perspective, we need media architecture. In the current multidisciplinary context, architecture is no longer an independent field but a social complex. 2 Media equipment has already become a common element in shaping urban public spaces, including kiosks, digital surveillance cameras and computerized transportation systems. Just as Venturi recognizes the aesthetic participation of the public in his book Learn from Las Vegas, architects also need to participate in the improvement of secular architecture and bring more vitality and interactions to the architectural space. Media architecture caters to the perception of modern people, including the efficient and slightly fragmented viewing habits and the technological embodied contents. There is an attempt to bring participatory culture of the network society to the physical world in all aspects of life.

Religious communication led by authority.

Gothic Period

The power of the institutions or individuals.

Detached

The spread of graphic design and the form of advertising buildings.

A symbol of Consumerism.

Industrial Revolution

Postmodernism

Renaissance Period

Media architecture is not simply a performance project but can have more potential. It is a carrier that can redefine our public space by strong interactions between virtual and physical world between people, communities and cities and forms a sense of the participatory culture in reality to evoke urban space. Media architecture can bring public art into the ordinary people. By incorporating public art and digital programming, the architectural field can be broadened. At the same time, the urban facades can be returned from the symbol of consumerism to the expression of context and culture.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Editorial

What is Media Architecture? Here to give a definition to media architecture as the topic of the journal. Media architecture is described as the integration of architectural structures with displays and interactive installations, featured in media facades and urban screens. In a boarder sense as mentioned, architecture itself is the media. While media architecture approached to an interdisciplinary field together with architectural design, lighting design, digital diagramming, visual arts and interactive design. Just as Beatriz Colomina said, We should understand architecture as we understand painting, photographs, writing, movies, and advertising; not only because these are the mediums we often experience, it also because the architecture itself is a way of expression with its own rights. 3 According to Hank Haeusler, the predecessors of media architecture are light architecture, illumination of buildings and signs on buildings, which all credit to artificial light. The concept of media architecture is still growing and now getting in touch with digital platforms and smart city technologies etc.

How? Thus, media architecture can be studied in three levels: The first level: An integrated new architecture form with media functions. One example is the Bushan Cinema Center designed by Coop Himmelb(I)au. (See Figure) The multimedia roof covers the entire front square of the building, combined with the curved form of the roof to form a huge downward multimedia canopy. All building information under the canopy is clearly identifiable and displayed on the multimedia screen.

The second level: An art installation with technological attributes. The example is ‘Behavior Morphe’ designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. (See Figure) It applies the most advanced digital space simulation technology to dynamically demonstrate how to use artificial intelligence technology and digital tools in architectural design. The light show takes place in the front square of a German palace, using the entire facade of the palace as a carrier of digital media. The third level: An interdisciplinary complex that goes beyond the media skins of the architecture, but with practical functions. The example is Archive Dreaming designed by Refik Anadol. (See Figure) However, it is now still a prototype as an installation level. It employs machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,7million documents. Users can actively browse and search through all the documents from the Ottoman Bank’s Cultural Archive, dating back from the 20th century to the 17th century. 4

Busan Cinema Center (2012) Coop Himmelb(I)au Source: https://www.archdaily.com/347512/busan-cinema-center-coop-himmelblau

Conclusion Architecture has media attributes while media architecture strengthens its media qualities and brings new features. It is the direct outcome of the perceptural environment at nightThinking beyond light architecture and electrographic signs, media architecture can bring a lot of positive meanings which can refresh both the architecture discipline and the urban environment. This journal is therefore trying to create a platform to strengthen this research direction and release more potentials of media architecture in the future. At the same time, it tries to deal with the current issues and brings back a urban sustainable environment. We should also admit that media architecture cannot solve all the issues as listed in this modern media society. And the negative sides including the overload of information spam and aesthetic fatigue drives the researches to carefully develop the topic from a

Behavior Morphe (2012) Zaha Hadid Architects Source: https://www.designboom.com/art/zaha-hadid-behaviour-morphe-light-mapping-projection-karlsruhe-09-14-2017/

Archive Dreaming (2017) Refik Anadol Source: https://refikanadol.com/works/archive-dreaming/?i=d

Notes: 1. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press, 2013. 2. McQuire, Scott. The Media City : Media, Architecture and Urban Space. Theory, Culture & Society. SAGE, 2008. 3. Colomina, B. “Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media.” MEDIA CULTURE AND SOCIETY. 1996 4. Chang, Zhigang. Media Architecture - An Entrance to Hybrid Space. Time+Architecture, no. 2 (2019): 33.

INTERFACE

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Editorial

MEDIA CITY MEDIA, ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN SPACE

(part)

Scott McQuire Abstract: Scott McQuire thinks the modern city is a complex of media and architecture. He calls it as an ‘ageographical city’ without a specific place attached, but with ‘a sort of devolution of urban power into a state of randomness and unpredictability’. Digital networks and mobile devices which enables place-specific data and real-time feedback circuits, stimulate new demands for everyday experience of public space. He also examines the mechanism of surveillance and spectacle in the new form of city and tries to implant the form of collaborative practices in the online culture into urban space.

*Text below is for reference only.

Space no longer exists: the street pavement soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps, becomes immensely deep and gapes to the very center of the earth […]. (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painters 1910) If you build buildings with lights outside, you can make them indefinite, and then when you’re through with using them you shut the lights off and they disappear. (Andy Warhol 1975) On the evening of 11 March 2002, two powerful searchlights shone vertically up into the night sky over Manhattan. Six months after the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers – the first major ‘media event’ of the 21st century – the void left by the absent buildings was filled by what were dubbed two ‘pillars of light’. This commemorative event formed part of a long line of light-based architecture – most infamously Albert Speer’s ‘Dome of Light’ created from 100 searchlights at Nuremberg in 1935 – in which electric light was used not only to illuminate urban space, but to effectively displace the solid volumes of built structures. In this chapter I will argue that electrification forms a foundation of the media city. The rollout of electricity not only established one of the prototypical urban networks, but the lighting of the city marked a critical threshold in the psychogeography of modern urban space. The impact of electricity, carrying new potential for both ‘action-at-a-distance’ and controlled illumination, was a major factor in urban space being increasingly experienced in terms of flows. Electric lighting created lived spaces in which the traditional function of architecture as a stable ground found itself subject to a growing mutability of appearances and fluidity of functions. In the first chapter of Understanding Media, McLuhan made the affiliation between electric light and modern media clear when he seized the light bulb as his primary example of a medium without a message.

INTERFACE

In the context of proposing his famous argument that ‘the “content” of any medium is always another medium,’ McLuhan (1974: 16– 17) added: Whether the light is being used for brain-surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that the ‘medium is the message’, because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The electrification of industry and into public streets and private demarcating the modern industrial underwrites the distinct patterns of production and social life, but also a perceptual laboratory, the site for effects’. Strangely, while there are a plethora of biographical accounts of the discoveries and business strategies of inventor-engineers such as Edison and Tessler, and numerous economic histories of the ferocious patent wars and internecine political struggles to form some of industrial capitalism’s most powerful corporations such as General Electric and Westinghouse, there are relatively few attempts to theorize the impact of electric lighting on the experience of transport, combined homes, has been one city from all dispersion and effectively transforms the the construction of new with the extension of electrical grids of the key technological vectors previous social forms. Electrification concentration which not only shape both modern industrial city into and often unexpected ‘special urban space. 2 However, in the absence of systematic analysis, what can be found are snippets scattered through the writings of artists, architects, journalists, filmmakers and other observers of the modern city. One thing most of these reports make clear is that, from its inception, electrical illumination exceeded a purely functional role.

Bodies and Devices: Geolocative Media Source: https://vimeo.com/376280098

This excess is central to understanding the divergence between the explicit rationale advanced for various schemes for lighting the cityscape, and the wider penumbra of social affects that lighting produced.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space

MEDIA FACADES - HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, CONTENT (part)

Matthias Hank Haeusler Abstract: In this book, Hank Haeusler lists three features of artificial light, which is lighting (to illuminate buildings), emphasis (to highlight the detail of buildings) and atmosphere (to adopt different colours and brightness). These features can also be achieved through the media facade. It is also different from the definition of Light Buildings as it incorporates dynamic images. He believes that media architecture has “shifted from displaying signs to rebuilding itself”. His project Hypersurface Architecture is the one attempt to rebuild architecture in the digital age. *Text below is for reference only.

How has media architecture impacted on design? Unfortunately what we mainly see is urban screens, not media facades or media architecture. What we experience at the moment are the first steps into defining what architecture could be in the communication age. It is similar to the industrial revolution where architects struggled at the beginning to find an architectural language that reflects the cultural and society changes and finally resulted in modernism. We are at present at a stage where architects are experimenting to find an answer to cultural changes caused through communication technologies and digital technologies.

How can lighting enhance or detract from a building?

Everyone would agree that the rise of smartphones, the internet and others have changed dramatically the way we live and it is no surprise that this reflects back onto how we see and design architecture. I would argue that media architecture is one form of this reflection. How else is technology impacting on architecture? Architecture is very often the mirror of technological developments. Without a progress of various technologies architecture does not develop. An example for this is laser cutting of steel elements. Originally mostly used in manufacturing industry, it now has a large impact on how buildings are designed and fabricated. It is the same for digital technologies.

Light – daylight or artificial light – has always played an important role in architecture. Any material will change its appearance at different days or seasons, reflecting weather or time of the day. One cannot control this and nature decides how the material will look like the next day. At night is does not happen – only if one has additional building material that emits light and illuminates a building facade and therefore allows a controlled material change through light. What do you think will be the biggest architectural challenge in the next 12 months? For media architecture, to understand better urban interaction design. It is one thing to interact one-to-one with a personal device but by far harder to understand who is enabling the interaction when several people are standing in front of one big screen. There is plenty more to study and to understand.

Hypersurface Architecture[Redux] Source: https://www.mediaarchitecture.org/media-architecture-biennale-2012-student-competition/

Since the rise of the smartphone I no longer need to arrange a time and space to meet someone at a certain time at a very distinctive location, like in Flinders Street Station under the clocks. I simply use my phone to co-ordinate when and where in a far dynamic way. This has most likely influence on our behaviour and therefore onto architecture.

INTERFACE

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Media Facades - History, Technology, Content

NEW MEDIA FACADES: A GLOBAL SURVEY (part)

Martin Tomitsch Abstract: Martin Tomitsch and M. Hank Haeusler set the foundation theory of Media Architecture Biennale. The in-depth reference book written together with him, New Media Facades: A Global Survey (2013)shares the cutting-edge technology of media facades with 35 current examples, as well as the topic of sustainability. The book discusses the potentials of display technologies as a city interface with the ‘Time Square Effect’ as the motivation while reducing light pollutions with sustainable facades. Time Square Effect: The phenomenon that using massive digital media to create an iconic symbol of New York City.

*Text below is for reference only.

Transmitted light / Phantom view There are various points in which media facades may come into conflict with other functions of the building. The most important ones concern light and energy (for energy see below, sustainability). With respect to light the issue at stake is that components of a media facade cover parts of the surface of the building. Sometimes there is not enough daylight reaching into the inside of the building, sometimes there is none at all, and so the use of the subjacent space as office space is no longer possible. For this reason, various approaches have been taken to reduce the light-emitting parts and to maximize their luminosity. The properties of LEDs serve these goals well and thus they are increasingly integrated into facade components like cover caps and louvers for sun protection so that they subduct only a small amount of daylight. In other cases, occupants are completely unimpaired by the media facade. There certainly is a logical conflict between the performance of transmitted light and the resolution or the pixel pitch also in those cases, where the lighting socket is integrated into the facade. In order to attain higher resolution or to reduce pixel pitch between rows of pixels, the facade grid has to be adjusted accordingly, or alternatively louvers for sun protection or similar components need to be placed in front of the facade, which necessarily impairs the performance of daylight. Satisfying solutions are especially achieved through the use of forward-spaced components with integrated lighting

LEDs are very effective, but if they are used in high numbers (in some projects way beyond one million units), then their consumption levels accumulate or square. The brighter, the bigger the total area and the more densely packed the pixels are, the higher is the energy consumption. Acute cases involve competing with sunlight and operating displays during the day and under direct sunlight. We will not have to wait long for discussion to come up about the meaningfulness of such projections. Here, as in other cases, one will have to compare costs and benefit, and relevant in this case has to be what is justifiable to society, not simply what a big company can afford. Since the issue of energy seems to essentially involve problems of distribution, one can not categorically speak of what is justifiable and what is not. If enough energy is available on the spot, for example due to the utilization of sun power, argumentation will be facilitated, as in the case of Greenpix. Furthermore, one should clearly keep in mind that besides the operation, other phases of the lifecycle of a display also have to be included in an ecological balance sheet, like its production and disposal.

Media Architecture Biennale Source: https://www.mediaarchitecture.org/ author/martin/page/2/

Media content and the building Energy consumption – sustainability In time of increasing energy consumption, which not only leads to high costs but also to conflicts evolving around distribution, one cannot keep quiet about the fact that media facades consume energy – quite much in some cases. The consumption depends on the effectiveness of the illuminants, as well as on their number and luminosity.

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Media content and the buildingThis concerns the issue whether or not the projection of a facade takes into account the building as spatial structure or the local environment. This is another case which is closely related to the integration of the display into the building. Even if a smooth integration has been accomplished, the projection still may not establish a relation to the building. In my opinion, one can not speak of a relation even if the logo or the products of the building’s proprietor are included in the projection.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Using the World as a Canvas

MEDIA ARCHITECTURE - AN ENTRANCE TO HYBRID SPACE

Zhigang Chang Abstract: In this article, Zhigang Chang points out the future trend of media architecture will be a cross-border cooperation without a fixed industry order. Their hierarchical relationship is completely dynamic. Anyone of these disciplines may become dominant instead of being dominated by architects in the past. It is unpredictable and dynamic. This will inevitably form a new value system and aesthetic standards for architecture. The impact is even subversive. By giving an example of the media architecture as a vertial installation in Berlin, Chang emphasizes how media architecture creates a new dimension beyond traditional architecture disciplines, where a common building can create strong interactive values. Each window is equivalent to an independently controllable single-color pixel. Passing citizens and tourists send instructions to the interactive platform via mobile phones, and then they can control or get a graphic or animation on the facade of the building. *Text below is for reference only.

Before the advent of the Internet, architects were responsible for the mission of promoting human communication, that is, the communication “server” of “creating a place”. Western classical architecture pursues the scale and span of space, and seeks to accommodate as many people and objects as possible, and its space is static, complete, and isolated; modernist architecture pursues continuity and fluidity of space, and promotes the space as much as possible Human movement and communication; Deconstructive architecture pursues the event and plot of space, emphasizing people’s interpretation and reconstruction of space; digital architecture emphasizes the experience, gameplay and fun in the space, aiming to attract more people to participate among them. The evolution of space as a whole follows this vein: from small to large, from closed to open, from static to dynamic, from emphasizing the space itself to emphasizing the interaction between people and space. Architectural space always takes the promotion of people’s communication and exchange as its mission, and takes people’s emotional experience in the space as its value. People’s aesthetic experience of architectural space (especially public space) depends on the emotional experience of interaction and communication between people and space in the architectural space. The transformation of architectural space always leads to the maximization of communication. If classical architecture provides three-dimensional communication space, then modernist architecture with spatial fluidity provides four-dimensional communication space. In the 21st century, the emergence of media architecture has once again increased the communication dimension of space. .

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In 2001, a group of artists organized a celebration through a building in Berlin. This is a small high-rise office building with 18 windows on each floor along the street façade. The artist placed fluorescent tubes behind each window on the eight floors of the building, and one of them controlled the switch. Since each window is equivalent to a monochromatic pixel point that can be independently controlled, the entire office building’s street facade forms a matrix of 144 (8×18) pixels. The ordinary house became the largest screen in the world at that time. A computer control system and an interactive platform are also set up in the building. Passing citizens and tourists send instructions to the interactive platform via mobile phones, and then they can control or get a graphic or animation on the facade of the building. What the artists did not expect was that the influence of this public art activity continued to expand, and the appearance of many cities was gradually changing, and a new architectural form—media architecture was gradually produced and developed. In 2003, the Graz Art Museum built in Vienna installed a circular fluorescent tube on the back of the glass curtain wall, and controlled the brightness and darkness by the BIX system to form different graphic images and animations, which are considered to be the world Go to the first media building. After 2010, a large number of media buildings appeared in China. Especially since 2015, China has become the country with the fastest development, the largest construction scale, and the most comprehensive complexity of media buildings in the world. Among them, Hangzhou G20, Xiamen BRIC Conference and The media buildings during the Qingdao Shanghai Cooperation Conference are represented. Hundreds of buildings interact with each other to form a giant screen on the urban scale that extends for several kilometers, reshaping the nighttime landscape of the city, with great visual impact. These media buildings have even become the city’s business card or even the symbol of the country’s image, forming a huge social influence.

Journal of Media Architecture

Media Architectural Installation in Berlin Source: https://www.archdaily.com/296275/ media-architecture-oscars-awards-announced

Volume 01

Media Architecture - An Entrance to Hybrid Space

BEHIND ‘URBAN SCREEN PRODUCTIONS’

Lubi Thomas Abstract: As a curator of Urban Screen Productions, Lubi Thomas will share her experience on how to create necessary cultural outcomes on cummnity buildings in our public space. She will discuss several questions: What is the best race track for public spaces in the digital age? How can urban screens fulfiill the inherant value of public space rather than be consumed by it? How can screens be more efficiently used in public spaces to engage the public rather than drive the crowd away by dizzling lights? Her talking will point to the potential of sustainale public engagement in the future.

*Text below is for reference only.

The articulation and publication of site responsive cultural curatorial programming models, and their associate reporting matrices, are not made openly available for public enquiry and examination. Through practice led research informed by a creative practitioner’s approach, this thesis proposes an articulation and presentation of a curatorial programming model and its associated reporting matrices as they relate to a non-traditional exhibition site. Through a series of descriptive visual examples, the research illustrates a new digital platform for the capture and analysis of, a previously difficult to capture, curatorial programming model. The proposed model draws together a site-responsive arts practitioner turned curator’s expertise and experience, the theories and practices of reflective practice and curatorial studies, and the underpinning tensions, structures and principles of the Creative Industries Precinct (CIP) engagement program. The conceptualized platform delineates and connects the curatorial and managerial aspects of programming, which are essential to the development and delivery of non-standard cultural engagement programs. The proposed digital platform offers a collaborative, agile and integrated approach to envisioning, delivering and demonstrating the activities of a site responsive cultural program. It draws on performance indicators, offers facilities for archival material, and enables engaging, intuitive data presentation of information pertinent to the curatorial and managerial agendas of cultural programming emerging from the nexus of art, technology, design and science. Through production of a suggested programming model and an accompanying theoretical framework, Curating in Uncharted Territories examines one curatorial response to programming in a non-traditional engagement site, for the purpose of critique and future study. In 1989, I shook hands with someone in Germany; only I was in Newport, South Wales at the time. It was clunky and there were streams of wires, but it was my first networked, haptic experience. I was attending a Visual Arts course, with a difference - run by Roy Ascott, supported by Apple Inc.

INTERFACE

The conglomerate’s sponsorship in those days looked like rooms of computers and plottable, but there were no manuals and yet a few determined souls worked out how to program these machines to produce interactive artworks. The prevalence of technology (from computers to video cameras, editing suites and electronics) in the late 1980s was unique in the art school landscape. Whether one interacted with the technology or not, its presence and the reason why it was present in an art school underpinned and diffused into the cultural and theoretical discourse of the degree and college. Most of the students present were somewhere between being techno-pagans and cyberpunks (although neither term was widely used at the time). The course reflected Ascott’s visionary theories and ideas concerning concepts of cybernetics and telematics1, and the impact and possibilities that the digital and telecommunication network age would have upon our global consciousness. As Ascott quantified: “The art of our time is one of system, process, behavior, interaction. As artists, we deal in uncertainty and ambiguity, discontinuity, flux and flow.” Ascott’s attitude and perception of the role of art and artists was a far cry from the traditional and standard visual arts courses on offer at the time. Ascott presented a model of art practice that reframed the role of art, the artists and the audience. He talked about the opportunities made possible by the increasingly hyper-network connected world that was emerging. As Ascott states in his essay, ‘Art & Education in the Telematic Culture’ (1988), “The primary effect of creative interaction within such networks is to render obsolete the distinction in absolute terms between the artists and viewer as producer and consumer” Ascott’s visual arts course reframed the notion of art and the artist’s role and exemplified the types of technological leaps and tools that would make such theories and worlds possible.

Journal of Media Architecture

Projects of Urban Screen Productions Source: https://www.urbanscreens.org or http://archreview.blogspot.com/2012/04/ mq10-mapping-facade-projection.html

Volume 01

Behind Urban Screen Productions

‘WE AS ARTISTS NEED TO INTERVENE.’ —— Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Caroline Goldstein Abstract: ‘We as artists need to intervene’ is the title of Caroline Goldstein to discuss Rafael’s work and design thinking. This time we invite Caroline to have an interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to further disscuss his interest on media architecture with his two projects Body Movies and Airborne Projection. Body Movies and Airborne Projection are two public multimedia installations which can capture the behavior of people in the square, and project back onto the media interface. The vitality of the square is determined by the flow of people. These two works represent the topics of public participation and computerized control embodied in his electronic art.

*Text below is for reference only.

Approaching “Unstable Presence”, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2018 solo exhibition at Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art, I was racked with anticipation. My first encounter with the Mexican-Canadian artist was in the second year of my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, when, during an “Introduction to Electronic Art” course, the professor showed our class a documentation video from Lozano-Hemmer’s 2004 installation work, Pulse Room. Although almost entirely ignorant to “interactive art’s” strategic possibilities, the class was rapt, and I clearly remember the stilled awe that swept us as we realized that the piece’s grid of rhythmically blinking light bulbs were responding to the individual heartbeats of countless previous visitors.

Lozano-Hemmer’s artistic practice has long been understood as an extended aesthetic contemplation of the ways that technology has, in the electrified 21st century, inextricably and irreversibly fused with every aspect of, and even the very notion of, “life”. In 2018, this socio-artistic ethos has come to resonate with an alarming force. Against the past decade’s backdrop of regular data leaks and privacy breaches, Lozano-Hemmer’s works highlight how commonplace the internet’s corporate, political, and military surveillance protocols have become. “Unstable Presence” arrives to a world in which the majority of technologized people live their lives fully aware that their every digitized interaction – whether message, post, or preference – is likely to be recorded, sold to the highest bidder, and stored across a hive of databases around the world.

At the time, this piece’s gesture struck me as the soaring pinnacle of artistic poetry: an abstract staging of virtual togetherness, leveraging a ubiquitous and sterile technology (the simple incandescent bulb) – using the vernacular of a deterrent urban sphere – to trace a sparkling mosaic of vital intimacy. This memory weighed heavily as I walked through the Museum’s front doors. As early as the exhibition’s first room – which houses the 2008 work Pulse Spiral (a reformulation of the earlier Pulse Room) – every trace of this utopian reverie was wiped away. It immediately became clear to me that Pulse Spiral, Pulse Room, and indeed Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s entire practice treads graver paths than my younger self had been capable of understanding. My naïve projections of connection and togetherness were promptly wrenched into the steely, clinical realm of informatics, biometrics, and ubiquitous surveillance. These themes are – and always have been – the true discourse with which Lozano-Hemmer’s works interface.

INTERFACE

(Top) Body Movies (2001) Source: https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/ body_movies.php (Bottom) Airborne Projection (2013) Source: https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/airborne_projection.php

In the mid-1970s, philosopher Michel Foucault famously coined the term “biopolitics” to describe the historical tendency, originating in late 18th-century Europe, for imperial powers to understand and organize their populations through numbers, ratios, charts, and other stable metrics. Biopolitics concerns the reduction of “life” into quantifiable categories: rates of birth and death, income distribution, patterns of housing, or illness and health1. (Contemporary biopolitical parameters might look more like “search history”, “credit card records”, or “location data”.) While Foucault could hardly have imagined the sublime scope that contemporary biopolitical strategies would obtain, buttressed by equally sublime increases in database and network technologies, he rightly insisted that biopolitics existed then (as it exists now) ultimately and only in service of the more nefarious notion of “biopower” – the mobilization of this biopolitical data to exert precise control over every aspect of the populations’ lives.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

THE BUILDING AS SCREEN: A HISTORY, THEORY, AND PRACTICE OF MASSIVE MEDIA (part) Dave Robert Colangelo Abstract: The book The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media (2019) illustrates the cinema-like qualities and charateristic network of massive media in the urban environment. The book tries to historicize and theorize the media screens on buildings as an assemblages of techology and social issues. Dave Colangelo set his view on the ‘Election Night in New York city’ to find the historical clues of media architecture.

*Text below is for reference only.

This massive public visualisation of data and digital imagery tapped into the status of the building as an icon and as a monument that is augmented with programmable lights to create a spectacular embodiment of data that becomes the focal point of a worldwide news event. While buildings have been the substrate for delivering news about elections via magic lanterns since the early twentieth century, this current incarnation as a digital, networked screen means that buildings can now perform historical realities in real-time, inserting themselves into public discourse in the process both as and on architectural surfaces. In addition to the ongoing screen-reliant transformation of iconic and monumental buildings in cities, critical and creative uses of what is often referred to as media architecture (Media Architecture Institute 2015) — buildings with dynamic, expressive, often-digital, elements — have also changed the nature of what we look up to and interact with in public space. Artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer have spearheaded and developed much of this work, using the power of the monumental building or the pulpit of the public, commercial screen to insert messages of anti-consumerism and criticisms of government policies, exposing the complexities of capital, geopolitics, and identity in powerful, highly visible ways that only massive images in monumental public spaces can provide. Famously, Holzer’s expansive Truisms project found a temporary home on Times Square’s Spectacolour electronic billboard, displaying messages such as ‘PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT’ and ‘MONEY CREATES TASTE’ in what might be the spiritual centre of American capitalism and consumerism. Newer works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, such as his Vectorial Elevation series and Body Movies, extend the possibilities of light and architecture to include the direct participation of people at various sites, as well as incorporating telepresent participation to expand the possibilities for identification and meaning at and between these sites through buildings that have in effect become screens.

INTERFACE

Along with buildings that have leds directly embedded into their façades, merging physical mass with ephemeral animation, high-resolution largescale digital projection mappings are now common in cities around the world. Synchronised displays across cities, such as Hong Kong’s A Symphony of Lights, which incorporates over 40 buildings in the skyline, have become popular for touristic as well as political purposes. Light festivals such as Vivid Sydney and the Fêtes des Lumières in Lyon transform entire sectors of cities into digital cinemas and outdoor galleries for public art and spectacle. Coordinated monumental lighting displays have also been incorporated into city-wide protests and demonstrations. In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on the offices of satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, the words ‘PARIS EST CHARLIE’ were projected across the Arc De Triomphe and the trademark light show of the Eiffel Tower was dimmed to pay respect to those who had died in the attacks. Both intensified a sense of solidarity through light, architecture, and public space with those gathering and demonstrating in the city. While artistic and political uses of large-scale projections, screens, and media façades multiply in cities, it should come as no surprise that advertisements take up the most space and time on buildings that have become screens. In this sense, it is more often the case that cities and buildings are not becoming screens so much as they are becoming ad-based media channels. Buildings such as the Empire State Building regularly rent their luminous tip to corporations (such as Facebook and Microsoft) or even Broadway shows to display their colours and use the resulting ‘content’ for promotional purposes. For example, a recent promotion for Verizon saw the building display the results of an online poll that asked fans who they thought would win the 2014 Super Bowl in the week leading up to the event, eventually displaying the results of the daily tally in the colours of the more popular team on the building.

Journal of Media Architecture

Charles Graham, ‘Election Night in New York City’, The World’s Sunday Magazine, November 8, 1896. Photo: courtesy of the Library of Congress, newspaper microfilm 1363.

Volume 01

Behind Urban Screen Productions

ON THE DESIGN OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA ARCHITECTURE FOR PUBLIC ENVIRONMENT Marius Hoggenmüller Abstract: Marius Hoggenmüller will talk about the cutting-edge lighting technology behind media architecture through his recent rototypes Sketching-in-light, LightBricks and Orkhēstra. Sketching-in-light is a toolkit to assit and evaluate the design outcomes. LightBricks is intended to build miniature models of low-resolution media facades and pre-test visual content rapidly and at low cost. His work Orkhēstra makes an attempt to get a seasmlessly integrated outcome of architecture form and digital media. It also uses LED technology to generate media content according to people’s interaction.

(Top) Sketching-in-light (2017) Source: https://marius.hoggenmueller. com/#sketching (Middle) Orkhestra (2014) Source: https://awards.mediaarchitecture.org/mab/project/157 (Bottom) LightBricks (2015) Source: https://marius.hoggenmueller. com/#lightbricks

*Text below is for reference only.

Innovations in light-emitting diode (LED) technology enables the creation of new visual displays that are unique in size, shape, material, pixel arrangement and resolution. Due to the great flexibility, designers from various domains are using digital media as a design material: applications range from wearable LED displays that fit into clothing and lifestyle accessories, wayfinding displays and digital signage, to large-scale architectural structures created of individual pixel elements. These displays are characterized by their low resolutions, in some cases featuring a complex pixel or three dimensional shape (3D) pattern, and their lighting quality, which distinguishes them from conventional 2D rectangular screens. Depending on the display’s resolution and the context in which they are deployed, content can be explicit text-based or abstract. As with any design, sketching and creating early prototypes is crucial for “getting the right design and getting the design right”. According to Buxton, sketches should be plentiful and quick to make, while prototypes are important for the iterative refinement of an idea. However, this is still a challenge when it comes to the creation and representation of content in the design process of low- resolution (low-res) lighting displays. Due to the characteristics of low-res lighting displays, prototyping visual content via conventional digital media displays is not always sufficient. An often underestimated parameter when working with lighting includes designing lighting as material: transparency as a material’s property can be used to filter or conceal light aimed at influencing the visual experience of low-res lighting displays. To achieve an overall aesthetic result, the material’s choice should be included already in early prototyping stages to perform more design iterations along with content explorations. Therefore, appropriate tools are needed to support designers without having an expert knowledge in materials and engineering.

INTERFACE

The toolkit presented in this paper, Sketching-in-Light, addresses the following limitations of current prototyping approaches: (1) Low-fidelity (low-fi) prototyping methods and tools from related fields (i.e., graphical user interface design) cannot be adopted easily due to specific properties, including low resolution and lighting quality. (2) Designers working in this domain therefore have to employ high- fidelity prototyping already early in the design process (i.e., using the real components of an eventual design) before having concepts evaluated on a lower level. (3) Doing so results in increased time and cost spent on prototyping, especially if experts from other domains, e.g. electrical engineering, have to be included due to a lack of knowledge in engineering and programming by the design team. Our toolkit enables: • Sketching with light on the same level as sketching with paper and pen taking into account a display’s specific characteristics. • Hybrid crafting of early designs using physical and digital materials. • Performing more design iterations fast and at low-cost before the actual implementation. RELATED WORK Creating prototypes as early design instantiations for future products is a widely used practice in various design disciplines. For graphical user interfaces (GUIs), designers can choose from a wide range of prototyping methods and tools during different fidelity stages of the design process. For example, paper prototyping as a low-fidelity technique is often used in early phases to communicate ideas in collaborative design teams or to evaluate various concepts with users in a time and cost-effective manner. However, since the prototypes’ material influences the design aspects that can be manifested by a prototype, conventional paper prototyping techniques cannot be simply applied to any context.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

On the Design of Interactive Media Architecture for Public Environment

WHAT IF BUILDINGS COULD SEE?

Jason Bruges Abstract: Jason Bruges will introduce his two typical works and the theory behind according to media architecture. His work Showtime uses cameras on the roof to capture the changing colour of sky in 24 hours a day on Leicester Square and reflectes back to the media facade of W Hotel. The facade also corresponds with the long history of cultral diversity in this Square dating back to the 19th century. Another work Shadow Wall is a media artwork as part of the eastern elevation of the Royal Route underpass. It is activated by pedestrian’s movement and reflected back with an animated visualization of the shadow of the figures and the flow of people. It creates an interactive experience that stimulates the public interactions with the architecture.

*Text below is for reference only.

Designing for audiences is about creating an architecture that is interactive, responsive, and dynamic. As a studio we are interested in creating environments and objects that have the power to change, transform, and update in some way. We use a diverse palette of materials, which might even be borrowed from an entirely different area, and which is future facing or tried and tested over the last twenty years. We use our in-house workshop to hack into these materials, pull them apart, rebuild and reconfigure them, or design them from scratch. We create prototypes and design iteratively, through making. Nothing that we create is abstract; everything is designed to have a living and animated, unpredictable entity interacting with it. Like the theatre, our work is about the collective human audience and creating artworks and installations that delight, entertain, and encourage. Whether we are creating a spectacle, a large-scale public performance, or an individual interaction, we focus on the subtleties of the interaction within its specific environment. The studio’s work is hugely varied and can be something that is designed to only last a few seconds in the real world—a piece that is filmed and shown on television for thirty seconds, for example—or something that has an eighty-year design life and must be robust enough to withstand significant changes in temperature. This means we constantly have to consider how technology and interaction can be updated—not just in the near future but longer term as well. And this can have a dramatic impact on how a design might develop, adding several layers of complexity to a project, and perhaps even determining the broader parameters complexity that shape it and the way that we want our audiences to interact with it.

For Mirror, Mirror (2009), a piece originally designed for the Decode exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the studio looked at the idea that an individual can be both audience and performer. the piece comprises a number of white–dot matrix panel modules carefully arranged within a pond that individually record and play back to the viewer what they are doing. The composition is arranged and built around capturing a person of full height in filmic–quality resolution, and then creating a reflection in the water. This recording and playing back is a popular theme in the studio’s work. Digital narcissism is an area that is gaining ever–increasing popularity; we find that people are becoming more and more interested in seeing themselves reflected in one shape or another, digitally. illuminated facade artwork, this piece allows the facade to tell a story about the area and to relay it to the huge numbers of people that visit and inhabit the area. Another type of audience—the commuter or moving audience— also has a colourful history, including spaces such as elevators, train, and cars. These environments provide very different vantage points and opportunities. In 2005 the studio created Litmus, a set of four artworks that are interlinked and act as markers in the landscape on the A13, one of the major roads into London. The twelve–meter–high sculptures are located on separate roundabouts and respond to local environ-mental stimuli. This includes the light and tide levels, the volume of traffic, and the power generated by a neighbouring turbine. They are carefully sited so as not to surprise or distract drivers along the road, and yet at the same time they symbolize and build on the regeneration of this area of Greater London. The discussions and questions that these pieces raise to those traveling along the A13 are what make them interesting to us as a studio.

(Top) Showtime (2010) Source: https://www.jasonbruges.com/ art#/showtime/ (Down) Shadow Wall (2014) Source: https://www.jasonbruges.com/ art#/shadow-wall/

INTERFACE

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Waht If Buildings Could See?

UP INTO THE UNKNOWN —— Interview with Peter Cook

Babara Steiner Abstract: Peter Cook pioneers the application of BIX Media Facade, which features in double layer facade with fluorescent light into the Plexiglas panels. ‘The Kunsthaus can change its skin like a chameleon.’ said Colin Fournier. ‘The BIX is part of the “skin”: the Kunsthaus Graz has no walls, no roof and no base, but rather has a connected shell, a skin.’, said Peter Cook. ‘A BIX file is a file in .mov format.’ ‘Up into the Unknown’ is originally the title of an article by Barbara Steiner to analyse Kunsthaus Graz. This time we try to invite Barbara to have a discussion with the designer Peter Cook, to talk about how media technology can be incorporated into the architecture form. By taking the typical work Kunsthaus Graz as an example, we want to ask how the radical architecture theory can be realized by technology, and where media architecture can lead us to. *Text below is for reference only.

Affectionately named The Friendly Alien, by its designers Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, the Knusthaus Graz was built for the European Cultural Capital 2003 activities in Graz, Austria. Since the time of its construction, the biomorphous building has become a main attraction for art lovers and the culturally minded from all over the world, while also becoming an essential landmark in the urban identity of the city of Graz. This project demonstrates an impressive synthesis of innovative design language with the historic setting of the urban district along the Mur. As an exhibition center for contemporary art, the building exhibits Austrian and international art from 1960 onwards. The new Kunsthaus Graz acts as an interface between past and future, creating a productive tension between tradition and avant-garde. Despite it’s out of place appearance amongst the surrounding baroque landscape, the building itself was well received and has found its place within the city as being a gift for the future. Functionally and technically, the building meets the most up-todate requirements on the international loan circuit. Within the building there is 11,100 square meters of useable space designed specifically to present and procure contemporary art productions. It is a multi-disciplinary venue for exhibitions, events, and other means of presenting contemporary art, new media and photography, with a generous delivery area, depots, and workshops, and modern lighting and security systems to ensure the professional handling of exhibition projects. There is also an innovative and cost-effective air-conditioning system that meets all the demands of the most important art owners. While the building’s interior is meant to inspire its curators as a black box of hidden tricks, its outer skin is a media façade which can be changed electronically. Its BIX media façade was designed by realities:united and constitutes a unique fusion of architecture and media technology that transforms the plexi-glass building into a large screen in the middle of the city.

INTERFACE

Not only does the Kunsthaus Graz allow a place for the exhibition of art, but with its blob like form and unique façade, it becomes an instrument of art communication, and a contemporary piece of Austrian art itself. The idea of the media installation BIX arose out of considerations on how to equip the interior of the Kunsthaus in Graz with media. BIX was created as an additional feature at a time when overall planning of the building had already reached an advanced stage. In addition to the late date and technical complexity of the project, it was also a challenge to integrate an architectural concept of foreign authorship into the expressive building. It received approval from the client and the architects because it was based on the architect’s original ideas for the sleek, blue, shimmering façade: Constructed from about 1,300 individually shaped, translucent Plexiglas panels covering the biomorphic building, the so-called skin was intended to feature different nuances of transparency, which would have created varying communicative relationships between interior and exterior. For both technical and budgetary reasons, the skin’s physical transparency had to be abandoned, degrading the material’s transparency into mere decoration.

BIX Media Facade on Kunsthaus Graz (2003) Source: https://vimeo.com/376280098

BIX consists of a matrix of 930 conventional circular fluorescent light tubes integrated into 900 square meters of the Plexiglas façade on the east side of the Kunsthaus. The individual, continuous adjustability of the lamps’ brightness with a frequency of 18 frames per second makes it possible to display images, films, and animations. During the development of BIX, key performance features of conventional large-scale displays were radically abandoned in exchange for a number of substantial advantages. The resolution of the matrix is extremely low. There are only 930 pixels—a mere 0.2% of the pixels found in a conventional TV screen—and they are monochrome.

Journal of Media Architecture

Volume 01

Interview with Peter Cook