A teaser from guest curator Joshua Noble for the forthcoming Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action - the issue will be published in early 2010.
[Gordan Savicic / Constraint City / 2007]
What does it mean for computing to be embodied? What does it mean for living or working spaces to be computationally enabled? It seems that these two concepts are tied together in important ways that shape the emerging answers to both. Architecture/Action is an exploration of the body in architectural computing, that amorphous territory where cybernetics, phenomenology, physiology, and architecture come together to create functional and controllable spaces organized around the human body. Inevitably, when technology changes, the relationship of the human body to the space of action that we experience as our environment changes as well. From agriculture, to industry, to computing, a shift in how and where we act, work, and communicate alters our perceptions of our bodies and of the spaces around them. The now near-ubiquity of computing and networking and the explosion of interest in the body and gesture in interaction design has created an array of new areas for exploration in designing, altering, and questioning the way we relate to the world. The points of intersection between physicality, architecture, and computation seem to multiply almost daily. Networks of tiny devices enable rooms, appliances, buildings, personal devices, and systems to communicate seamlessly. Techniques for computer vision enable the creation of reliable, consistent, and robust systems to detect gesture, combine live images in live time, and perform complex motion detection are open source and available. The beginnings of the tools to integrate movement, space, computing, and communication are available, so the questions now become: how are we tying spaces, devices, and bodies together? Where is the boundary that separates space from computation or action from communicative action and data? What will a truly reactive and intelligent architecture and environment look like and how will it shape the way that we interact with our world? What modes of artistic expression and inquiry will arise from the attendant sociological shift? In Architecture/Action we examine some of the implications of working this territory for the designers and artists that approach it, examining projects in critical design, interaction research, installation art, and architecture that are creating spaces for play, work, contemplation, and communication. We’ll be including contributions from Usman Haque, Andres Ramirez Gaviria, Mark Shepard, Carolina Vallejo, Patrick Grizzard, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, and many others.
