Situated Technologies Pamphlets 4: Responsive Architecture, Performing Instruments — Authors: Philip Beesley, Omar Khan. From the Editors:

This volume of the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series discusses key qualities of “responsive” architecture, a framing that understands it to be a performing instrument. A new generation of architecture that responds to building occupants and environmental factors has embraced distributed technical systems as a means and end for developing more mutually enriching relationships between people, the space they inhabit, and the environment. In contrast to wide optimism about this new kinetic, interactive technology, this conversation examines responsiveness as mutable and contestable. Continue reading

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ABSTRACT: “Kepesian Visualization is an emerging artistic and scientific genre that is focused on planetary science and has roots in scientific visualization and environmental art. The genre produces aesthetic engagement that reveals the intrinsic beauty of geophysical systems through data discovery by means of techniques that influence perception. This experimental approach focuses on the pre-attentive state in a non-photorealistic abstract form by employing two key elements: aesthetically biased symbolic representations designed for a fast-paced transient environment and subtle player interaction mechanisms. Continue reading

Lungs [The Breather] — by Laura Colmenares Guerra — is an interactive, immersive installation environment which explores passive/active bodily processes. An amplification and intensification of the unconscious body to generate a conscious movement towards the question of body’s perception. The installation is set up for four people. Video.

Responsive Environments: Architecture, Technology and the Senses :: March 27-28, 2009 ::Université de Montréal, École d’architecture, Pavillon de la Faculté de l’aménagement, 2940 ch. Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Montréal QC, Amphithéâtre 3110.

Nestled in geodesic domes, the members of the 1960s utopian communities, their minds chemically expanded, surrounded by stroboscopic lights, projections, loud music and perfumed incense, attempted to counter the modernist project of disciplining and isolating the senses by revisiting the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. Continue reading

Chunky Move’s Mortal Engine :: March 4-8, 2009, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, Australia.

Somewhere between waking and sleeping, between thought and feeling, lies a body that we possess but cannot control – Chunky Move’s startling new work begins here. Mortal Engine is a dance-video-laser performance using movement-responsive technology to portray an ever-shifting, shimmering world in which the limits of the human body are an illusion. Mortal Engine accelerates us into a reality of permanent change where crackling light and staining shadows represent the most perfect and the most sinister of souls. Continue reading

The Grafting Parlour: Growing Light and Other Conversations at LIGHTWAVE (January 23 - 31) :: January 23 - February 20, 2009 :: Workshop: January 28; 3:00 pm :: Artist Talk: January 29, 6:00 pm :: Science Gallery, Trinity College, Pearse Street, Dublin.

Growing Light and Other Conversations is an eco-communication system for interfacing with science, with a live display of photo-responsive microorganisms based in a remote laboratory, at the Biological Engineering Laboratory at MIT. This web portal into the laboratory is a microscope into living science. Continue reading

The Colloquy of Things — Philip Beesley, Marc Bohlen, Natalie Jeremijenko (Moderated by Omar Khan) :: December 11, 2008; 7:00 pm :: The Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City.

This panel discussion will explore the growing agency of natural and artificial “things”, a theme being developed by the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series. What are the social and technological challenges when “things” begin to be the producers and consumers of information? What are the opportunities and consequences of delegating greater responsibility and autonomy to technologies or natural ecologies? Continue reading

Textiles Futures Research Group Presents: What Future for Living Textiles? :: October 23 - 24, 2008 :: ICA Theatre , London.

Textile designers are uniquely placed to inhabit other design fields and cohabit with the world of science. In recent years the potential of nano- and bio- technology has caught the imagination of a new generation of textile makers, particularly in the fields of fashion and architecture.

Unimaginable materials are being developed: grow-into clothing; fabric to be sprayed from a can onto surface and body; fabric to mimic responsive behaviours found in nature. Even the body’s own skin is being explored as an interface for evolving, almost invisible, technology. Design of tangible and tactile intelligent surfaces is beginning to evolve in product form, for the body and in the built environment. Continue reading

[Image: Tropisms by Neri Oxman] CHI 2009 Workshop: Programming Reality: From Transitive Materials to Organic User Interfaces :: April 4-5, 2009 :: Boston, Massachusetts, USA :: Call for Participation - Submission Deadline: October 23, 2008 :: Submissions and enquiries: programmingreality [at] media.mit.edu.

Over the past few years, a quiet revolution has been redefining our fundamental computing technologies. Flexible E-Ink and OLEDs displays, shape-changing and light-emitting materials, parametric design, e-textiles, sensor networks, and intelligent interfaces promise to spawn entirely new user experiences that will redefine our relation with technology. In one example, future flexible displays will allow us to design devices that are completely flexible, and that can curve around everyday objects or our bodies. Continue reading