Einsiedeln poles, "sketching" and collective planning buildings in situ

In the Swiss town of Einsiedeln, city planners put up poles marking the actual volume that would be occupied by a proposed building.   This way all the townspeople form their judgments of how this building would fit into the neighbourhood in situ.





See also, Christopher Alexander’s description of his method starting from the lived experience of the site, and refining concept in moving between multiple representations —sketching, modeling in clay / paper / balsa,  finite element computer modeling, drawing, punctuated throughout by mock-ups on site, in situ with successively more and more convergent materials.

A Small Example of a Living Process (the design and construction of the Upham house in Berkeley):

and the much larger project: the design and construction of the Eishin campus in Japan,
and a hospital in Oregon.

softwear and wearable architecture

txOom, FoAM
2002
Great Yarmouth, East Anglia UK



using pre-cursor to the Ozone media choreography system now in Synthesis

with wireless sensors embedded in walls, fabric, aerial costumes, giant squeezable balls
driving responsive sound and video ( Max/MSP/NATO )

Rolling and squeezing the giant medicine ball with embedded accelerometers
(worked better than bend and pressure sensors at the time)
drove a fomant-based speech synthesis external (CHANT)
to make a screaming moaning creature …

Synthesis and small-mammal art

Many artists and DIY makers try to do their own engineering in an ad hoc way where the poetry becomes caged rather than trellised by the technology.   That's partially due to lack of engineering — not merely technical knowledge but judgment.  A competent engineer solves particular problems efficiently using the entire spectrum of contemporary techniques, a wise engineer thinks reuse while solving problems.   We need wise engineering.  AME has several faculty and staff who embody such combination of technical know-how and judgment.   The maker / DIY attitude is also a consequence of a "truth-in-materials," making-based studio art practice, that in turn was a political reaction against the extreme conceptualism in Euro-American art institutionalized in the first half of the 20c.  This maker-turn is healthy ab ovo, but too quickly becomes dogmatic and self-disempowering when mixed with naive anti-intellectualism.

So much new media, intermedia, makerbot, and DIY tech art feels like the creative flame is encased in some mechanical exoskeleton.  On the other hand, the answer is not simply throw away with structured knowledge and produce shapeless blobs of stuff — “jellyfish" art.  I hope we see more work with bones and ligaments and movement continually made afresh adeptly and deeply informed by technicity (borrowing Simondon).   Art by small mammals in the age of dinosaurs.

SYNTHESIS CALENDAR, FALL 2015

SYNTHESIS FALL 2015

Sept 2, 3, 4
Ginette Laurin and the SERRA workshop


Periodic:
Thursday lab sessions 

Periodic:
ECM authoring sessions


September 29 6pm-10pm 
Experiential Climate Model deployment at CCS 15
Doubletree in Tempe
multimodal presentation for complex models
Doubletree Priest and ______ .

November 4
Diemo Schwartz IRCAM 
Workshop
iStage

November 6
President Donors

November 7 & 8
Guillermo Gomez Pena and La Pocha Nostra working sessions in iStage


November 23
Rob Melani Walton visit Synthesis + AME
Stauffer + iStage
• Digital Culture in Stauffer ground floor 
(similar to what Loren Olson, David Tinapple, Kim Swisher showed in Stauffer 125 last year for Dean Tepper)
scaling studio experience up to large numbers of students, retaining the best features of studio critique, peer learning, and project-based learning
• The augmentation or enchantment of everyday space: Stauffer Lounge
• Rich expressive environments for collective experience: iStage as Story-Telling space
cultural, personal modes of sustainability
• Responsive environments for science : collective, embodied interaction with climate models
social, urban+energy, hydrological, meteorological modes of sustainability
Demonstrate: rescaling (body, movement, time, geography-space), phase change, data / simulation  / pop communication / immersive experience 

————

Rhythmanalytics

Place and Atmosphere 
experiential climate model


________________________________________________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Complex Biosocial Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
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