Animated objects in performing arts
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Project Description
Can architecture integrate living functions? What are the fundamental qualities that living architecture might offer? The research explores the relationship between bodies, space, and choreographic prototypes by studying visual consciousness, human perception, and movement awareness.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
Our daily lives experiences are more powerful than we think they are. They are constantly moulding us as individuals and shaping the environment around us. The development of choreographic interactive objects enables the possibility of containing these actions in a physical space that is usually static and untransformable.
This project illustrates how moulding the space with our bodies is a constant construction of experiences that forms and re-form who we are. A choreographic object enables the bodies within and around it to inhabit and manipulate the participants' knowledge. These intentional and non-intentional manipulations of the space can create an affective adventure and are what many geographers define as built spaces. The architectural space constantly signals what to do where to go and unconsciously moulds our feelings, behaviours, and actions.
This research involves the study of extensive and intensive space. Through a series of experiments with a choreographic object, it demonstrates a future of possibilities of architectural and performative spaces that might enable the communication between multiple human bodies and the built environment.
It aims to be an open tool that enables an understanding of how our bodies react to manifestations of movements around them through the performance of contemporary dance professionals. It offers a different perspective to the performer and the audience of ways of expressing and modifying the space around them together.
Key objectives for sustainability
Moulding the space is a constant construction of experiences that forms and re-form who we are. The interactions between ourselves in our daily lives take place in the intensive and extensive space simultaneously. As humans, we cannot see our interactions or precise composition of vectors that identify who affects us the most, who concerns us the less, and what is the result of this ‘own-self’ that is constantly being affected. We are not aware of this, and there’s no clear way to quantify this data. These interactions make us who we are, and conceptually this is what Locus aims to express through a choreographic performance.
Performances are built through a creative process similar to that of the design of architectural spaces and machines. The project is based on principles that have been applied previously but pursued to suggest an authentic result. Additionally, the constructed product is delivered to residents and users who form their behaviours relevant to the specific project when a design process is completed. Likewise, any art piece and especially the performances are created for recipients, spectators’ group, that will develop their unpredictable behaviours. The use of the terms ‘interactivity’ and ‘participation ‘in the contemporary art field implies a ‘trend to break down the culturally determined distinctions’ between real life and art, affecting the bidirectional relation of audience and performers. However, this project asks whether interplay mechanisms can be formed and activated through the directors’ and scenographers’ visions?
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The project concerns the issue of audience behaviour as an interactive parameter, explicitly addressing the question: How might dynamic scenography using real-time systems invite an audience's body participation in stage performances? The proposed prototype and performance will be a creative generated event based on the continuous evolution of human and non-human behaviour on stage without being directed by a predetermined structure. Performance is underpinned by a technical design and an interactive performance system.
This, it is hoped, will facilitate audience participation in the performance event. Both inputs (the performer's body and the audience location) are intended to generate a clearer idea of how our bodies interact every day with each other in the spaces around us, and on the other to allow both the audience and the performer to experience the interaction in a particularly tangible way through accessing the affective dimensions of the space in action.
However, the project's prototype is not an architectural entity with the functions of habitability. It is a choreographic object that observes its human impacts upon them. As such, the project reflects how actions that might be seen as minimal and with no influence affect the space around us and, in this sense, complete a loop of constant relations in our everyday lives. All our actions depend on our feelings and affect humans and non-humans equally, and even our most straightforward steps conceptually would have a high impact on the environment.
Key objectives for inclusion
Through this research, I will raise fundamental questions. How can we produce a sense of presence and enhance self-awareness during interactive experiences? How can we design kinetic, living architecture that engages with participants during extended interactions and enhances the human experience in an immersive environment? How does visual and movement stimulus variation alter an individual's state of consciousness and perception of the environment? How does an analysis of Metzinger's embodiment contribute to understanding the functionality of an interactive installation and increase the human response to these evolving interactions in mutual adaptation? Answers to these research questions could offer practical methods for working with our increasingly complex and fragile built environment. New technologies and new design working methods are needed for this emerging field, giving buildings a kind of 'agency' that creates active conversations and exchanges with occupants.
The project was born from the idea of transforming the space using two principal tools. The first one is using the action of body joints of the performer as an input for the system to understand the potential of human bodies in space, tracking the joints using a Kinect V2 sensor. The second one is to use the audience's positions in space, captured by a Grid-Eye camera mounted above the performance area, as a trigger for the system. In this thesis report, I will focus more on the interactions with the performer's body.
The work moves away from known models that reinforce habitual responses within architecture towards an understanding of adaptive systems that are active agents for communication and exploration. Architecture is explored as a medium for spatial interfacing within the research context. Design is thus considered durational, real-time and anticipatory through exploring human to human, human to machine and machine to machine communication.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Development of architectural scales of responsive, robotic functions that can effectively function within the public sphere of architecture requires specialized expertise that draws from multiple disciplines, including professional architecture, performing arts, system design and computer engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering etc.
The challenge posed is how design can construct shared environments, enable curiosity, evolve, and allow complex interactions to arise through a human and non-human agency by placing the attention on behavioural features that afford rich conversational exchanges between participant and systems, participant and with other participants and system with other systems.
The mobile or choreographic object is a composition of triangles intended to be a flexible mesh that can be modified in different directions. It will be hung from the ceiling and controlled by a group of ropes all connected above in a control base. This base has the primary purpose of holding the electronics in charge of the control of the structure as it responds to the performer's movement.
We aim to show these changes by creating an environment where communication is established between machines and the body.
