‘Constructing Realities’ is the summer exhibition at Arup’s Phase 2 Gallery presenting some of the best of London’s young graduate architecture students work. It follows last years Digital Hinterlands exhibition which brought together masters student work from across London’s four leading architecture schools, the AA, the Bartlett, Westminster and RCA.

Justin Goodyre – A Prototype for an Adaptive Bloom

This years exhibition focuses on the best work from the new Postgraduate Certificate Course in Advanced Architectural Research, set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, to give students with Masters degrees the opportunity to take their work to a further stage development. The exhibition shows how some of the best Masters portfolios and theses contain the seeds of serious design research proposals, and how these might be taken forward to create new types of place, novel interactive building elements and new façade and structural systems.

Tetsuo Nagata – Monomyths

Architecture and engineering have a history where research and practice go hand in hand, where many great practices have grown as a result of fundamental research and where many research projects arise from groundbreaking design. This is especially true during periods of economic inactivity when recent modes of working are called into question and new modes (sometimes based on rediscovered historical precedent) are established. This can lead to the formation of innovative practices and to the start of academic careers in research and teaching.

Matt Shaw – Subverting the LiDAR landscape

Constructing Realities only shows the tip of the research iceberg these students have gone through turning dozens of drawings, experiments, physical and software prototypes into standalone pieces. Work presented includes a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set, site specific responsive installations investigating themes of digital participatory storytelling, virtual environments exploring maze and labyrinths as apposing models for spatial navigation, and laser scanning drawings exploiting the potential for error, mistruth, mistake and subversion within their production.

Vlad Tenu – Minimal Surfaces as Architectural Prototypes

The exhibition runs until the 1st October 2010

website

FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.

Keynote Speakers (clockwise): Mark Burry, Matthias Kohler, Philip Beesley and Neri Oxman.

FABRICATE has emerged as the first in a series of focused events from the highly successful ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference and ‘Digital Hinterlands’ Exhibition in September 2009. Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in collaboration with The Building Centre London, this conference intends to frame discussion around the presentation of built or partially built works by individuals or collaborators in research, practice and industry selected from submissions through our Call for Works (deadline 10 September 2010).

Gramazio & Kohler’s R-O-B. Brick fabrication robot which will be exhibited alongside the conference

Representing the broad disciplinary spectrum from design to production, the presentation of built work will contribute alongside leading invited speakers from Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. A significant and supportive context for the event will be provided by London’s extensive network of global creative consultancies, many no more than a short stroll away from the venue.

We welcome original, innovative and pioneering projects for the Call for Works and we would also encouraged works in progress to enter too. Submission requirements emphasize strong and informative visual material with succinct analytical text and project synopsis. Selected conference submissions together with articles from keynote speakers will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press and launched at the conference.

Dezeen are running a competition to win copies of my recent book Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands.

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/06/10/competition-five-copies-of-digital-architecture-to-be-won

Homesense is an open research project collaboration between Tinker London and EDF R&D. Bringing open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home selected households will create their own smart homes and live with the technologies that they have developed themselves without any prior technical expertise.

Over the autumn of 2010, 6 households across Europe will be selected to take part in Homesense and as a result, have access to the latest in open source hardware and software tools. Homes in the UK, France and Italy will decide what they want to do with the tools in their own context, and share the results with the world. Each household will receive support from their own local expert, also selected from the DIY electronics community, who will help them design tools, tackle problems as they emerge and help share the experience of living with smart things in the home.

More information can be found here

The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. Archigram Began Life as a Magazine produced at home by the members of the group, showing experimental work to a growing, global audience. Nine (and a half) seminal, individually designed, hugely influential, and now very rare magazines were produced between 1961 and 1974. The last ‘half’ was an update on the group’s office work rather than a ‘full’ Archigram magazine. The Six Members of Archigram are Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton. Cook, Greene and Webb met in 1961, collaborated on the first Archigram magazine, later inviting Herron, Chalk and Crompton to join them, and the magazine name stuck to them as a group.

More Than 200 Projects are included in the Archigram Archival Project. The AAP uses the group’s mainly chronological numbering system and includes everything given an Archigram project number. This comprises projects done by members before they met, the Archigram magazines (grouped together at no. 100), the projects done by Archigram as a group between 1961 and 1974, and some later projects.

1. The sadness of most art is that it does not know its future. The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past.

2. Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.

3. If it looks just like, you know, ‘art’…it probably isn’t.

4. Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.

5. Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.

6. Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.

7. The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.

8. Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.

9. If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.

10. In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.

11. Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.

12. 99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.

13. Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.

14. Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.

15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.

16. We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however “global”, local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.

17. Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.

18. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.

19. Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.

20. Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.

21. Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.

22. The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.

23. There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.

24. Art is not craft.

25. What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.

26. Seen in the light of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, computer art is very spectacular indeed.

27. Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.

28. There is no “normal” computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.

29. When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.

30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.

31. The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.

32. ‘All that is solid floats into air’ is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx ‘n’ Engels’ prediction for late capitalism.

33. A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.

34. When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.

35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.

36. Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.

37. ‘i’, the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.

38. The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.

39. We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.

40. Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.

41. Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won’t care.

42. Many of the ‘objects’ of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ nearly 40 years ago.

43. Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.

Via CAS & Paul Brown

Speed of Light celebrates the tenth anniversary of broadband in the UK. Stripped back to its essentials, optical fibre is a thin strand of glass, with nothing more than a flickering beam of light traveling along it. United Visual Artists have used this beam as the starting point for the work.

Speed of Light consists of 6 site specific installations connected through light and sound. The story begins with an input from the audience, which is transferred into a pathway of light, leading through the atmospheric environment of the Bargehouse. The continuous line of light evolves through each installation in turn shifting in intensity and form. Speed of Light uses over 148 lasers across four floors and six rooms of the Bargehouse, a raw and industrial warehouse on the South Bank.

Speed of Light opened on the 9th of April and runs through to the 19th, so this weekend is your last chance to see it!

Presented by Virgin Media, for more information visit the Speed of Light Website

Thomas Schielke sent me his youtube presentation of Luminous ceilings a few months ago and usually I bin such emails since I like to find things for myself but I really enjoyed the way this research was put together (except the chessey music). Thomas explains that besides these ceilings providing spacious impressions they this work always metaphors the natural sky. “The historical observation of ceilings reveals that the image of heaven, which reached a theological culmination in the luminous Renaissance stucco techniques, turned into large-scale light emanating surfaces.”

The Ocean of Light project explores the creative and immersive possibilities of light-based visualisation in physical space. It uses bespoke hardware to create dynamic, interactive and three-dimensional sculptures from light.

Surface is the first artwork to be exhibited using the Ocean of Light hardware. It uses minimal visuals and sound to evoke the essence of character and movement. Autonomous entities engage in a playful dance, negotiating the material properties of a fluid surface.

The Ocean of Light project is a collaborative research venture, led by Squidsoup and supported by the Technology Strategy Board (UK). Partners include Excled Ltd and De Montfort University. Additional support and resources have been provided by Oslo School of Architecture and Design (Norway), Massey University, Wellington (New Zealand) and Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University (Aus). Squidsoup is a digital arts group specialising in immersive interactive installations within physical 3D space. Their work combines sound, light, physical space and virtual worlds to produce immersive and emotive headspaces. They explore the modes and effects of interactivity, looking to make digital experiences where meaningful and creative interaction can occur.

There are few courses as extraordinarily ambitious as the Interactive Environments Minor a semester-long project at TU Delft organized by the Faculty of Architecture – hyperBODY and Industrial Design and Engineering – ID-StudioLab.

“Throughout the course, three interdisciplinary groups of students supported by TU Delft researchers and guest teachers have designed and built three interactive lounge pavilions. The pavilions attract people to enter, facilitate relaxation and provide a refuge from daily chores.”

“Each of these structures is a dynamic system, which communicates with its visitors across different modalities. The installations not only actively adapt to their users’ actions, but autonomously develop a will and behaviour of their own. In this way interactive architectural environments come to life, engaging their occupants in an unprecedented experience of a continuous dialogue with the occupied space.”

While he’s been too modest to put his name up front on these projects, the real passion and brains behind this project has been Tomasz Jaskiewicz bringing together undergraduate students from a range of degree courses to create a unique design space occupied by programmers, engineers, architects and designers. I look forward to seeing how this evolves in future.

You can find out more at http://www.interactive-environments.nl/