EXAMPLE PROJECTS
2008/09
SPACES OF MOVEMENT AND INTERACTION
Taking inspiration from spatialised models of human movement (such as those first explored by Etienne-Jules Marey and Frank Gilbreth), this project engages with unacknowledged space that exists between the application and user. The study focuses on the act of drawing as experienced when using proprietary drafting and modelling software. In applications such as these, the mouse plays a vital role in the construction and manipulation of elements within the drawing. But unlike a pen or pencil, the way the mouse moves is seldom directly related to graphic forms. We move the mouse primarily in response to the demands of the user interface, but also always in uniquely idiosyncratic ways. Twitches and idle patterns traced out by the mouse exist in a transient and invisible space but as this project reveals, are also the site for fascinating forms of expression which otherwise fail to register in the drawings we produce.
Nikoletta Kostopoulou: MA with Distinction
DIGITAL MNEMONICS: MEMORY AND DECAY
The science of computing is built on the highly abstract logic of binary information. To move beyond the realms of mathematical reasoning and to apply this technology in a useful and meaningful way requires, therefore, that the software reshapes this information into a recognisable form. To do this, it relies almost exclusively on analogy: ‘folders’, ‘files’, ‘desktops’ and ‘chat rooms’ are all metaphors which attempt to convert the bits and bytes into something concrete and spatial. This project looks at two particularly prevalent metaphors: “memory” and “decay”, and attempts to explore the consequences of conflating human memory and physical decay with their digital equivalents. The project culminates in an experimental installation consisting of a camera-projector loop in which the ‘memory’ of past events are represented and gradually decayed as recollections becomes confused and fade.
Richard Almond: MA with Distinction
SLEEP ECHO
Sleep is a vital part of our existence, and yet for most of us the time we spend asleep remains a mystery. This project employs digital technology in an attempt to reclaim the time spent sleeping; to capture the movements and rhythms of sleep and map them back into our waking world. Translated into spatialised patterns of light, the movements of sleep are used to create an enveloping environment echoing the unconscious in physical space.
Oonagh Crotty: MA with Merit
NETWORKED TABLES
Social networking sites and mobile communication have radically changed the way we, as human beings, interact. But rather than replace real world communications these technologies, like those of the phone and telegraph before them, have been woven into our social structures and behaviour. This project uses a poker game as the site to explore the way gesture and verbal communication can be augmented by online systems that record and map the players interactions both with their environment and with each other. A global network of interactive tables allows players to simultaneously experience events which take place in other games in an extended online poker community.
Mark Steedman: MA with Merit
MECHANICAL SWARM
Built on scripted simulations of swarm behaviour, this project celebrates the elegance and poetic beauty found in nature. A series of abstract experiments are the inspiration for a fictional scenario akin to that of a “cyber-punk” novel. Teams of tiny robots are let loose in the city, programmed, (like bees) to collect the debris and bits of discarded machinery of an industrial city. From these scraps the robots build structures shaped by the patterns of emergent behaviour.
Albino Alejandro Vicente Soto: MA with Merit
2007/08
TIDAL LANDSCAPE
The Thames was once central to London life, and with it a constant awareness of the ebb and flow of the tide. In contemporary London, by contrast, the tide is largely ignored. This project seeks to create awareness of the tide (and the ever present threat of flooding), by constructing a landscape that engages directly with the water and offers a visual indication of water movement. Located between the embankment and the water, a system of platforms and steps at different levels provide a space in which water and land become blurred. Connected to commuter routes around London Bridge, this environment is also linked to the everyday routines of daily life. Traversable in different ways with different states of tide, the landscape is also dotted with sensors recording water flow both at a large scale with the tide and at a small scale, in the eddies and currents. These movements are translated into patterns of light that signal the water behaviour to the surrounding area.
Korda Aras: MA with Merit
MECHANICAL WAVE
Founded on an exploration of robotics and computer controlled mechanical movement, this project seeks to examine the potential for deployable dynamic structures. The Thames foreshore, made inaccessible by the high embankments built along its length, provides the setting for a dynamic walkway that can connect the embankment with the foreshore; be responsive to the local environment and reconfigure its form to suit different sites. The nature of this movement and its adaptability is central to the project and is inspired by the behaviour of water. As a result, the walkway moves in a manner that is characterised by waves. Each individual unit of the segmented structure contributes to the overall transformation by adjusting its relation to its neighbour and locomotion is achieved when servos move in sequence to create a wave-like motion through the length of the assembly.
E. Paul Evans: MA with Merit
BUS STOP INTERACTION
Inspired in equal measure by the complex social interactions that surround bus travel in London, and by the phenomena of social networking sites such as Facebook, this project explores the potential for an interactive social network interfaced through the bus stop itself. Beginning with an investigation of the existing behaviour and movement of people, the project documents the nature of spatial occupation at one particular stop and reveals the fluctuating communities of passengers. Not only a place to wait for the bus, but also the site for social interaction by school children, commuters and others, the bus stop is used by many different groups of people at different times, each with their own individual and connected social networks. In this proposal, the interactive pavement around the bus stop becomes the interface for an integrated network of users extending along the bus route and as an extension of their existing on-line identities. In itself acting as a map of the space within the bus stop, it also seeks to interact with the occupation of the space and construct new patterns of movement and usage.
Theodoros Kontaxis: MA with Merit
2006/07
A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR EUSTON STATION
Set in the uninviting environment of Euston station, this project proposes a social and informational network to revitalise the space and add a new dimension to passenger experience. The station population is by definition transient, composed of commuters, tourists and other temporary visitors. Utilising the blue-tooth technology in mobile phones, the network seeks, not only to offer information, but also to connect people who share the same destination or point of departure. Combined with games and other entertainments, the result is to create temporary communities and entertain the waiting passengers. Significantly, this project utilises the psychology of play and the culture of phenomena such as “flash mobbing” to outline a series of plausible interventions in the station environment. Extending beyond the physical limits of the building fabric, this project also explores the nature of place as redefined by wireless technology.
Carolina Briones: MA with Distinction
INTERACTIVE ENGAGEMENT
A sophisticated and thoughtful exploration of interactivity, this project proceeds from the premise that interactive installations rely too much on visual devices and mostly ignore the possibilities presented by haptic systems. Initial studies looked at art installations where greater bodily awareness is encouraged – such as Michael Cross’ ‘Bridge’, in which mechanical stepping stones respond to the weight of visitors as they navigate across a flooded space. Returning to digital technology, a series of machines were constructed that responded to physical touch and proximity. In addition to utilising the control offered through Max/MSP, the devices themselves appear dangerous and threatening, thereby inciting human response.
Chloe Mulvihill: MA with Distinction
CINEMATIC TIME
The spatial and temporal qualities of the cinema have provided the inspiration for countless writers, artists, architects and (of course) film makers. Based on the careful study and analysis of time structures in particular films, such as Michael Gondry’s “Sugerwater”, this project focuses on the nature of cinematic time and the potential for constructing a filmic relation between a series of real spaces. The project is set in the narrow streets and alleyways between London Bridge and Southwark Bridge on the south bank of the Thames. The centre-point of this route becomes a location at which past, present and future become conflated. Utilising a series of cameras and display screens, the imagined project would present passing pedestrians with both their past (in the form of time-delayed images of the route they have just taken), and a window onto the path ahead.
Oksana Makushchenko: MA with Merit
2005/06
HAPTIC INTERACTIONS ON THE TUBE
Situated on the platforms of the London Underground, this project explores the potential afforded by a system of interactive surfaces. In place of the conventional station wall, a matrix of sensitised tiles is set to change colour in response to the touch of passing passengers. Serving, in this way, to record the casual contact made by commuters brushing past or leaning against its surface, the responsive wall serves also as a creative medium with which the waiting passengers can interact. Over time, the recorded patterns of interaction build to form a map of the complex ebb and flow of commuters through the station – information which is then presented back as a cloud-like constellation projected on the facing wall.
Zelda Otto: MA with Distinction
AUGMENTED VISUAL SPACE
A sophisticated blend of real-time interactive technology and the art/science of visual perception, this project seeks to find a contemporary digital equivalent to the hybrid physical/representational spaces of classical perspective. The quadratura paintings of Andrea Pozzo and Borromini’s Palazzo Spada exemplify the way in which the two-dimensional devices of perspective can be combined and interact with our experience of physical space. Such projects are inevitably static and singular – but beginning with a working installation that employed interactive software and sensor technology to create a dynamically adjusting perspective representation, this project extends these illusions to incorporate movement and a dynamic response to the position of the observer in real space. In its final stages, the project imagines a real-time augmentation of visual space using a head-mounted display.
Antonio de Campos Passaro: MA with Distinction
2004/05
AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
In the age of interactive architecture (and the associated sciences of robotics and artificial life), this project explores the particular consequences of an architecture composed of autonomous components, each acting and reacting independently, but collectively exhibiting complex and unpredictable behaviour. Using an analysis of the rules that lie behind the movements of flocking birds or shoals of fish, the project looks at reproducing such effects in a digital environment. The result is an explicitly artificial and mechanical set of objects, set against which is the subtlety and complexity of movements derived from nature.
Tamara Salamín: MA with Distinction
ELECTROMAGNETIC SPACE
An electronic device, built and configured to sense electromagnetic waves. This array of sensors becomes the focus for a project that explores the invisible realm of wireless signals and the unseen fields created by mobile phones and related technologies. Based on information gleaned from a series of physical experiments conducted using this equipment, the project looks at the possibilities for making these signals visible and part of a three-dimensional spatial experience.
Waseim Aburwin: MA with Merit
DIGITAL HANDCRAFT
Conceived as a critique of the artificial and abstract forms of interface used for computer “modelling”, this project attempts to recapture the haptic and intuitive qualities of hand-crafting. The moulding of clay is the metaphor around which an experimental interface is devised. As an alternative to the keyboard and mouse the proposed device explores the opportunity for a digital equivalent to this especially tactile form of making.
Thamer Fakhry: MA with Merit
2003/04
GNOMINAL FRAGMENTATION
A series of physical experiments explore breakage and fragmentation by smashing plates and other objects. Video footage of these experiments was then used as the basis for a detailed analysis of the pattern and form of breakage, considered as a dynamic physical system. These scenarios were further explored using the specific functionality provided in Maya for simulating this behaviour in a virtual environment. Finally, based on the premise that Regent’s Park acts as London’s back garden, a witty proposal was developed in which the shattered pieces of a garden gnome act as interventions that challenge the formal order of the park.
Amanda Blythe: MA with Distinction
TRANSPARENCY AND REFLECTION
Taking the particular circumstances surrounding the combined reflection and transparency in a shop window, a careful analysis and exploration has revealed the complex spatial possibilities of this uniquely visual space. In part, a critique of the limitations of computer rendering, this projects returns to an earlier order of projective techniques that can be used to unfold and analyse the reflective mechanisms obscured by the ray-trace image.
Marinke Boehm: MA with Distinction
2002/03
DECAY
Challenging the cultural stigma surrounding decay, this project recasts the changes in form, colour and texture that occur as perishable objects decompose. Looking impartially, through a series of experiments, at the effects of decay, the patterns of change are codified and used as a generative tool for a creative process that produces formal complexity and a rich patina of texture and colour. Finally moving into an urban context, the buildings that comprise St.Barts hospital are used as the site for urban reformation and growth based on the behaviour of moulds and other ‘diseases’ that can affect a building fabric.
Tamasin Boyer: MA with Distinction
BEHIND THE SCREEN: INTERFERENCE PATTERNS
Inspired by the patterns of interference that mediate between the viewer and the content on the video screen, this project looks at moiré patterns as an artefact of digital technology. By first carefully documenting and cataloguing a range of interference grids, this information is then used as the basis for a proposal that uses the effects of a mobile viewpoint to create a dynamic formal pattern that responds interactively with the movement of the observer.
Stephen Karski: MA with Merit
VIRTUAL REFLECTIONS
The image of space reflected in the mirrored surface is an integral part of architectural experience. This project explores how ray-trace rendering can be used to control and explore this effect. A series of intriguing pieces demonstrate a mechanism through which simple configurations can utilise reflection to build complex formal spaces that move and change over time.
Abiola Thomas: MA with Merit
2001/02
A SYMPHONY IN 3D
Constructed around a study of alternative forms of musical notation, this project looks at the parallels that can be drawn between music and architecture. Hyogo, a piece of music by composer Werner Dafeldecker utilises an unconventional form of diagram to describe a musical structure that is inherently ambiguous. Unlike the linear form of traditional stave notation, this diagram allows the musician to make choices and follow many different paths. The diagram, and the musical routes that can be taken through it, also encourage a spatial interpretation. Particular possibilities are drawn from the diagram as a three dimensional model and the model becomes, in essence, a performance of the music. The result becomes, by analogy, a critique of architectural drawing and tests the distinction between diagrammatic convention and representation.
Neil Hamill: MA with Distinction
‘FOLDAMANIC’
A lead sheet, folded into increasingly complex forms, is modelled using a intentionally limited set of computer modelling tools. As the complexity increases, disparities begin to emerge between the material object and the computer model. By exploring these limits, the hidden geometric structures encoded in the software are brought to light. In this way, the project exposes a kind of virtual materiality. Not the explicit simulation of ‘real world’ materials, but a form of materiality that is buried in the functionality of the software and characterises the nature of the forms that can be produced. Of course the software seldom actually limits the forms that can be made in any significant way, but the suggestion here is that by understanding the nature of the software’s functionality, one might more fully exploit its potential. Further explored in the context of animation, the results become exquisitely beautiful.
Elinor Shpigel: MA with Distinction
PICTORIAL SPACE
Using components modelled from organic forms, a series of rich and complex compositions have been produced. Working predominantly in 2d, these compositions explore the way an impression of space can be constructed within the image. Devices such as scaling, repetition and blurring hint at forms which inhabit these enigmatic worlds. Engaging and intriguing, these images resist clear interpretation and mimic the subtle spatial qualities achieved in painting. Sensitive to the way in which every aspect of the presentation can affect the experience, the final images were carefully printed and lit to achieve an optimum result.
Hewaida Ramly: MA with Merit
2000/01
FROM LAS VEGAS TO THE SOUTH BANK : BINGO!
From a filmic and video analysis of Las Vegas and the spirit of Elvis Presley the project wove its magic; abstracting form and surface textures to be deployed in a new context and a South Bank People’s Palace. Its Bingo!
Hristina Hristopulu : MA with Distinction
THE ESSENCE OF ‘MA’ – THE SPACE BETWEEN
Investigations into the Japanese notion of “Ma” lead to pursuit of the “space between” in the construct of the city, where in the context of Tokyo a vertical labyrinth of experiential space is proposed in a ‘metabolist’ residential tower.
Taro Sakai : MA with Merit
1999/00
IMAGE BOX – VIRTUAL SPACE GENERATIVE DEVICE
Starting with theories of desire and dream as keys to the decodification of images the project devised exquisite three dimensional constructs, suffused with light, from which one could either decrypt their essence, or read imaginary yet very architectural spatial possibilities.
Davut Erkan : MA with Merit
EXPOSURE: A THEATRE OF CITY LIFE
A public passage is the stage in which the script of the ‘play’ is based on personal journeys interacting with projections from distant cameras recording the theatre of street and city life; an animated installation at Waterloo Bridge.
Ioulia Tsiouvara : MA with Merit
1998/99
PRISONS OF THE MIND – EXPLORATIONS IN THE GENESIS OF FORM
Investigations into ways of making, exploring and representing complex form; from the physical and hand-made wire-frame model, to its digitisation and rendering as a surfaced and complex three-dimensional construct, in a 2D realm; with references to Joyce “The Labyrinth” and Piranesi “Carcere” the journey is never complete.
Karim Hamza : MA with Merit
VIRTUAL SPACE (the) TRANSFORMATION OF REALITY
A study of “Cyber Distopia” where space, objects, forms and surfaces are represented and interactively rendered in ‘real-time’ on the Internet. The illusions are achieved through the medium of current VRML technologies and model as exemplars Escher precedents for improbable formal constructs, as well as a concept for a digital gallery.
Helmut Tichy : MA
1997/8
BIOMIMETICS; RESPONSIVE MATERIALS and VISIONS of FUTURE HABITATS
The scope of the theme was immense, and ranged from investigations of current developments in materials science, biological membranes and sensory devices, to the ‘near future’ predictions of Michio Kaku; in order to speculate upon the nature of a future living environment where surfaces, spaces and appliances are responsive to occupants, their habits and desires. While the design and formal arrangement of such a place remained elusive, the visualisations – even visions – were amply gorgeous.
Olakunle Shobowale : MA
GAMES: PROCEDURES for the DESIGN of a HOLIDAY VILLA
A systematic dissection and analysis of the spatial structure and reactive environment of a computer game led to the proposition that such mappings and strategies could be applied as a pattern book technique for selecting conditions and spatial arrangements pertinent to a holiday villa – an architecture overburdened with conventions yet, as shown by the novel and the film, pregnant with possible enigmas. Using sampled images the project illustrated compositions of spaces which beguiled yet concealed the interactive strategies required to alter conditions within the villa or provide for bodily needs.
Emmanouil Metridis : MA
