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Kinetic Light Sculpture (Möller, Christian; Kramm, Rüdiger), 1992Enteractive (Electroland), 2005
 
 
 

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installed as wall-size projections, which display via a customized browser, Internet search results based on verbal queries. There are numerous interactive wallpaper projects being deployed, including «Artifacts of the Presence Era,» an installation from the Sociability Group at MIT Media Lab, which uses a geological metaphor to create an impressionistic visualization of the evolving history of a space. «Swiss House» (2001) by Jeffrey Huang and Muriel Waldvogel, while it includes a ‹knowledge café,› is designed to be much more; it is «an inhabitable interface for connecting nations.» Proposed as a means to provide a reverse feedback loop for brain drain from Switzerland to the United States, the principles of the Swiss House included embedded information devices, intimate links between physical and virtual spaces, defined boundaries between public and private spaces, and deliberate use of the senses of perception— acoustic, visual, touch, and smell.

Reactive Architecture

As early as 1954, Nicholas Schöffer created a 50m cybernetic sound tower for the Exposition

 

Internationale des travaux Publics au Parc de Saint Cloud in Paris. In the 1960s, the British avant-garde architectural group, Archigram, was conceptualizing provocative visions of «Plug-in City,»«Living Pod,» «Instant City,» and «Walking City.» While they were not then buildable projects, their possibility is becoming less outrageous. In 2000, Archigram architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier won an international competition for the Kunsthaus Graz, an alien, blob-like structure, for which realities.united designed «BIX,» a 900 square meter installation of controllable light rings, which acts as an urban screen for artistic production.

Many artists have worked to make building façade’s not just expressive but reactive to various inputs. For Christian Moeller’s «Kinetic Light Sculpture» (1992), the Zeilgallery in Frankfurt changes color according to current weather conditions. For Electroland’s «Enteractive» (2005), pedestrian traffic into the building controls lighting on its façade as does kinecity’s work for «7 World Trade Center» (2005). Ben Rubin is designing a lighting system for the Cellular Biology Building at the University of Minnesota that corresponds to sound levels in more than 50

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