Digitalarti, in partnership with Muuuz.com, is presenting a new feature about innovation. This first article is about media art and architecture, with some examples of Muuuz news and 2 famous artists selectd by Digitalarti: the duo Electronic Shadow and the collective Lab-au.
"Caught between orthogonal volumes, acid colors and pixelated facades, contemporary architecture has been gaining inspiration, for years now, from the aesthetics and codes of the digital world. Beyond the simple reference or diversion, the image and architecture have hybridized. Constructs are used to transmit contextualized information, events, and media. Beyond Times Squarelike animated screens skillfully placed on or hung from buildings, architecture itself is becoming a screen for video projections. Information sculpts and highlights volumes and materials. It lays itself over the architecture. They recompose and complete each other, occasionally mixing together. The immaterial acquires mass, the second dimension takes on volume, and thickness. Beyond projections, the architectural elements sometimes become the message, parts of the façade come to life, become pixels. The immobile moves and vibrates. The building keeps on building. Collectively, architects, engineers, researchers, mathematicians, artists and programmers are changing the forms of the façade. At the crossroads of disciplines and science, prototypes innovate and stun, shake up our beliefs and standards. Matter is changing in real time, in function of the moment, the context, the need or desire. Today the facade is being smoothed away, the codes are blown apart, architecture is shedding its skin. In our living spaces and our cities, the landscape is being transformed. And the possibilities are positively multiplying."
Eric Foulon, creator and editor in chief of Muuuz.com
Hyposurface
"In recent years, architects and scientists have been developing prototypes of dynamic facades which can change shape in response to their context. Explored some years ago by Mark Goulthorpe Decoi the concept of moving the facade is still valid. Fruit of the combined efforts of architects, engineers, mathematicians and programmers, the changing facades loom on the horizon, composed of moving parts that can be reconfigured depending on the occasion. The front plate moves in 3 dimensions and in real time, according to the most diverse settings such as the influx or movement of users. A new form of architectural expression emerges".
When the wind shapes the architecture "For an office building located in Utrecht, the Dutch architecture firm Cepezed and artist Ned Kahn designed a facade that turns in the wind. The facade consists of a stainless steel mesh of 300 m² which is set in small transparent plastic discs. When the wind rises, it rustles the disks, and the second skin vibrates, capturing the sunlight and reflecting the sky so fickle. As the pixels, the bright spots emerge as patterns on a front-screen constantly reconstituted".
Flare, dynamic façade system
"Recently unveiled to the public during the exhibition NEXT - Art and Technology in Arhus in Denmark, Flare is a new system to create animated walls and facades. Presented by Berlin's Whitevoid, Flare is composed of modules consisting of metallic prisms mounted on small pneumatic cylinders. Computer controlled, the ensemble can accurately transcribe any type of script or animation. Their skin usually vibrates static and animated, light waves traveled or movements deep. Dynamic architecture is decomposed and recomposed in the eyes of the user. Metal prisms capture natural light, reflections adorn themselves, their multi-faceted transition from darkness to darkness, as pixels turn on and off."
Concrete led façade by Dominik Kommerell and Angela Renz
"Developed by German researchers, this prototype concrete façade incorporates LEDs. And the surface becomes architectural media. Dominik Kommerell and Angela Renz, researchers at the University of Applied Sciences at Stuttgart, devised the concept of a concrete façade with a LEDintegrated lighting system. The animated inert surface diffuses light and message. The completed work could have an impact on the world of architecture, as designers and builders alike could implement them into the exterior of buildings in the future. We can only imagine what a modern day Frank Lloyd Wright would do with these resources during a textile block system renaissance".
Published with Eric Foulon, Muuuz.com
The Digitalarti selection for the concept of dynamic architecture:
FRAC (regional contemporary art) CENTER & Electronic Shadow / The light image
In 2012, a brand new building will be inaugurated to welcome the Orleans Frac, and its unique architectural and arts collection. After a contest between multi-disciplinary artist/architect teams, the Jakob/MacFarlane (architecture) and Electronic Shadow (art) team suggested a project in which the image would be totally integrated into the architecture. The artistic project is happening on the surface of the building. A webbing of diodes of varying intensity, completely integrated into the building’s metallic skin, lights up the building, and its image. The edges of the building are lit up, following its architectural design from point to line, from volume to light, and then the light melts into the image that emerges from its frame, to become architecture itself. This is no led screen used to produce a large image, but an illuminated webbing that is part of the building’s very texture, dressing it in a series of skins, in function of its dynamically changing program. The images are generated in real time; the system is connected to the internet and to the Frac network, feeding off various current events to alter the facade according to flows, the temperature, weather conditions, various real time statistics, and information related to goings on in the building. The building's shifting skin will also be clothed in animations that have been specifically designed for the building's volume, which play both on its architecture and the major themes of the collections. The building will be clothed in this light image, as if to join forces with an architecture that is simultaneously investigating its own volume and the concept of dematerialization, in a XXIst century where information has become matter.
Lab-au & la Tour Dexia
The recent, enlightening projects of the Dexia Tower in Brussels, shows LAb[au]’s approach towards ‘mediatecture' as being a spatial and temporal programming of light which can create an interactive relationship between the user, the building and the city; the result is a complete transformation in the design of media façades as generic content displays, towards new vectors to think architecture, art and public space.
In the project "Touch", design aesthetics are directly deduced form abstract art such as Mondriaans ‘elementarism’ and Kandinsky’s ‘point and line to plane’; the scyscraper's architecture is where points = pixels = windows, lines and diagonals = levels and edges of the building and surfaces = facades, thus focusing on the relational qualities expressed by an elementary language, and exploiting interactivity not as being a control system but rather as a catalyst for these relational / representational parameters. For the permanent enlightening, the project ‘Who’s afraid of Red, Green and Blue’ draws on references to the philosophy of Barnett Newman, researching a symbolic value in abstract art by using colour and time.
The major challenge of LAb[au] within this context is the establishment of a philosophy proper to the artistic discourse, the building and the urban context. A series of projects have been conceived, among which specific interactive installations, a permanent artistic enlightening, and a series of live audiovisual events, where the aim of these enlightening projects is based on participation and identification, the creation of a new urban sign. Thus, the setup of entire communication chains allows an exchange between the individual and the public space, exploiting IC technologies, its processes and logic, to create a new and contemporary language of urban artefacts.
Published in the Digitalarti Mag #2.
Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.
Read the magazine for free online.
