omnispace

James Carpenter

Dey St. Tunnel by James Carpenter Design
The Dey Street Tunnel is a pedestrian tunnel that connects Fulton Street with the World Trade Center subway stations. For this project, a design by James Carpenter Design investigated several interactive solutions for LEDs in a space without natural light. The physical space animates as people walk through the tunnel at different rates, at different densities and from different directions. The LED lighting is integrated into only one wall of the tunnel through apertures in the polished stainless steel walls. The other walls, a combination of highly reflective and matt surfaces, create an illusion of multiple spaces and depths inside them.

Ada The Intelligent Room

Ada The Intelligent Room
created by Institute of Neuroinformatics
Ada is a novel artificial organism, a creature in the shape of a space that can perceive and react to its surroundings. At the same time, her form facilitates a novel interaction between humans and machine that goes beyond the possibilities offered by a conventional computer, such as keyboard, mouse or joystick. Ada has sensory organs. She can see, hear and sense touch and contact. While Ada cannot communicate with words, she expresses herself through sounds, light and projections. Ada likewise learns how to synchronise her various components, such as the floor plates, the movable eyes and the light fingers. Ada is able to remember the visitors with whom she has played and whose gestures, movements and sounds she has observed. Like humans, Ada learns from experience: she can store an incident and later build upon it. Ada can furthermore link various pieces of information and draw conclusions from this. Upon observing two individuals standing close together for a long period of time, she concludes that they are a pair.

auraLux: telekinetic pavilion

Supported by two London residential buildings is a glass footbridge which hosts a metallic neoprene sanctuary space. The pulsing sphere responds to guest’s brain activity, operating in multiple states of flux. Harnessing EEG feedback, a technique that measures in-flight brain activity in NASA pilots, brain signals are collected from sensors imbedded in furniture and fed via a processing unit to a fluidic muscle controller which expands and contracts the sphere. When guests realize their stress levels directly impact on the sphere, a state of ‘play’ is engaged, seducing them to proactively alter their brain state to leave their individual mark.

Supported by two London residential buildings is a glass footbridge which hosts a metallic neoprene sanctuary space. The pulsing sphere responds to guest’s brain activity, operating in multiple states of flux. Harnessing EEG feedback, a technique that measures in-flight brain activity in NASA pilots, brain signals are collected from sensors imbedded in furniture and fed via a processing unit to a fluidic muscle controller which expands and contracts the sphere. When guests realize their stress levels directly impact on the sphere, a state of ‘play’ is engaged, seducing them to proactively alter their brain state to leave their individual mark.

hyperLife: underground settlement

Olive trees and subterranean spring water provide the regenerative lifeforce behind a proposed underground housing settlement in Mani, Greece.

Each house shares elements of internal and external space, protecting gardens from the elements and simultaneously concealing the development in the landscape. Stone and native trees are the key materials - with each dwelling orchestrating its own solar and water collection.

nutopia: from virtuality to neurospace

My current interest in the dematerialization of architecture began with a self-funded millenium project, nutopia's cyberlounge. (Glancey, 2000) A proposed ‘office of the future’, my primary aim was to explore the possiblity of stimulating neural activity within the workplace.

Using a disorientating fusion of atmospherics within an edgeless multi-refracted interior, it hosted de-ionizing salt water tanks, ultrasonic sound, aromatic HVAC systems and low-level lighting.

Neural feedback, tracking systems and real-time data visualization tools were used to support the hypothesis of increased theta activity (brain waves attributed to dreaming and creative thought).

Softspace: interactive environments

SoftSpace - 8 Sep 07, 14.00–18.00
Tate Modern, £18 (£12 concessions)
Architects are disengaging from tectonics as we traditionally understand it and moving into the realms of ‘softspace’, a more fluid, ephemeral form of digitally-enabled design based on personalised experiences and responses. Softspace deploys new spatial systems including wearable computing, wifi, RFID and custom-designed digital software incorporating light, heat, sound and electromagnetic fields. These not only rely on people’s individual ways of interacting with them, but are enriched by narratives people contribute, creating new metaphors of use.

Cymatics

An intriguing study into wave formations (mostly sound) Cymatics looks at the mesmerizing organic shapes created by invisible waves. Founded by Swiss doctor and scientist Hans Jenny who used simple sine waves to create patterns in powders, liquids and pastes, the book collects images developed over 14 years. The resulting mandalas reference art (like the work of Herwig Weiser), architecture, geometry and nature, among other disciplines. www.cymaticsource.com

Paul Friedlander

Kinetic light artist Paul Friedlander's installation Timeless Universe is concerned with cosmology. His approach is through written records, varying from ancient scripts to signs, codes and mathematical formula. He takes these images full of mystery and fuses them using his own computer codes. The result is an generative kinetic work that never repeats, refreshing itself daily with a new variants and themes programmed into it. www.paulfriedlander.com

Ansel Thompson

Fibre optic sofa by Ansel Thompson exhibited at the launch of nutopia's cyberlounge 2000. www.anselandassociate.com/