INTERArChTIVE has commissioned Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (School of Architecture and Design, University of Brighton) and Karin Bech to develop the interactive installation Slow Furl for the Architecture 08 festival in June at Lighthouse in Brighton. The proposal is to make a room size textile installation that acts and reacts on its inhabitation. The installation exists as a soft and pliable skin that lines the Lighthouse space. The skin shifts. As guests enter and move within the foyer, the skin moves imperceptibly at deep timeframes, creating new cavities and spaces, revealing slits and apertures.

The project explores the notion of flow. Rather than fixing the digital in a responsive relationship to the user, where every call defines a reply, Slow Furl finds its temporality outside the immediately animate. The thick skin envelops the space in a deep furl. Like a glacier, this robotic membrane, is formed by its slow action, reacting imperceptibly to its inhabitation.

Slow Furl is playful environment that engages the physical presence of its guests. Users are invited to touch, to sit, or lie within its soft skins. As they do they feel the slow pulse of it’s movements. As a landscape, a cloud formation or an ice wall, it forms and reforms around the body of its user. Slow Furl is the making of a cybernetic environment that holds its own patterns of action and reaction. Conceived as an organism of interacting subsystems, the architecture holds an own motility, an own language of movements that defines its behavioural patterning. The skin clads a dynamic armature creating the possibility for movement. The armature is understood as a distributed computational system where separate parts hold their own potential for actuation. Each arm is controlled by a stand alone micro-controller that activates its mechanical movements. The skin acts as a unifier. Cladding the whole of the surface, the skin joins the movement of the individual arms into one fluid surface.

The skin also acts as a sensory system. Active patches are embroidered into the skin. These patches act on touch. As the skin moves, it activates the micro-controller. The simple shift between self activation (through the movement cycles of the armature) and interaction (through touch and movement of the users) allows the organism to engage an inherent indeterminacy. The architecture is behavioural rather than interactive, motile rather than animate.

Slow Furl has received funding from the Arts Council England, Lighthouse (Brighton) and RIBA (Sussex Branch). INTERArChTIVE is a consortium of Lighthouse (Brighton), Architecture Centre Network, interactivearchitecture.org and RIBA (Sussex branch). [via Interactive Architecture dot org]