aether architecture/
Adam Somlai-Fischer
An interactive prototype that treats digital media as physical matter,
Induction House proposes a more mutually informing relationship
between design and technology, writes Lucy Bullivant.
Induction House V2, ‘pixelACHE’, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 2004
A prototype within a series of installations and models investigating how digital media might be treated as physical matter, this created an atmospheric blend of art and architecture. The surface of a computer projection was unfolded onto a translucent structure, creating layers of digital information and the prospect of a nonscreen-based computer environment.
The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, one of the most important media theorists of recent years, who died in 1991, believed that ‘what we perceive as reality is a tiny detail from the field of
possibilities surging around us, which our nervous system has realized through
computation. If all reality is a computation from possibilities, then “reality” is a “threshold” value.’1Adam Somlai-Fischer, a young
Hungarian architect who runs aether
architecture (www.aether.hu), and a teacher at the Architecture and Urban Research Laboratory
KTHStockholm, wants architects to look more
closely at the implications of this. In particular, the fact that electronic media saturate our cultural environment, influencing our perceived reality. In fact, he says it is unavoidable: ‘Think about how many things you have seen for real, and how many on images and film.’
Somlai-Fischer decided to start from scratch, and ‘test new possibilities for real, asking what new architecture could arise from our rapidly developing environment. For this reason, I have decided not to draw plans and sections, as in a regular architectural project using
representational methods, but to build prototypes, in a 1:1 scale, that are testing the possibilities of blurring the electronic media into the physical space.’
Induction House is the most advanced prototype Somlai-Fischer, who is also a guest researcher at the Smart Studio of the Interactive Institute in the city working on collaborative projects (see pages 72–8), has designed to date. A set of installations and architectural
prototypes, it is aimed at developing a discourse about the design of interactive space and, more precisely, investigating ways of treating digital
media as physical matter. The surface of a computer projection is unfolded onto a translucent structure, with the result that ‘layers of digital information, behaviour and ambience share projection territories’ and create the prospect of a ‘nonscreen-based computer environment’.
At its inaugural unveiling at the Kunsthalle in Budapest in October 2003, Induction House was a 100 x 100 x 60 centimetre structure of steel and textiles, based on an algorithm that is a sliced flat plane folded, creating a 100 per cent projectable continuous surface. An electromagnetic-field sensor senses mobile-phone usage, and a set of light sensors the shadows of hands. ‘The mobile-phone calls change the electronic weather or projected colour
temperature, a process not unlike Usman Haque’s Sky Ear project (see pages 8–11). Somlai-Fischer has used exhibitions as a test-bed for evaluating ‘how certain issues and spatialities are responded to’.
By the time it was shown in its second version (V2) at ‘pixelACHE’ at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary
Art in Helsinki, in April 2004, the structure was much larger, at 600 x 300 x 170 centimetres, with 300 physical pixels in a matrix that moved along the projectors’ light, creating a 100 per cent projectable volumetric structure. Ultrasonic sensors measured visitors’ presence and distance. These first two incarnations used Flash as a projection engine, and to interface this program to sensors, a microcontroller clicking Morse signals on a USBcomputer mouse.
The team initially used these low-tech solutions out of necessity, and then as a choice: ‘Through constant reappropriation of existing technologies we create new interfaces that hold connotations towards their original use, so stay familiar, but misplaced in a new context.’
More recently, in the autumn of 2004, Induction House V3 was an 800 x 400 x 200 centimetre carbon- fibre, steel and plastic structure with 400 pixel folds, its spatial flows changed by approaching visitors.
Somlai-Fischer sees that by dissolving the physical structure in ‘the flux of interactive media, with media simultaneously becoming actual and spatial’, the interaction created is ‘symbolic, not really trying to function or process information, but to transform the physical entity in a nonphysical way’. His model for the project is borrowed from the systems thinking of complexity science, with several modes of concepts produced, each informing the other back and forth, developing as a whole system without a
predetermined hierarchy. Somlai-Fischer wants to talk about a new relationship between technology and design, in which ‘the role and effect of
technology reveals a more profound relation between design and design tools’, and in the process, as Flusser defined it, it becomes possible to ‘turn the automatic apparatus against automation’. 4
Top
Testing the projection for the installation of Induction House in Stockholm, 2004. Middle
Setting up Induction House at the ‘pixelACHE’ exhibition,
Kiasma, Helsinki, 2004. Bottom
A possible future version of Induction House. Note 1Vampyrotheuthis Infernalis, Immatrix Publications (Goettingen, Germany), 1987, p 59.
Below
The renovation by Dennis Wedlick Architect for the Department of Environmental Studies at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, supplied eco-friendly interiors in a recycled 19th-century academic building.