Cerebral Hut

source: highlike

Work: Created by Guvenc Ozel (ozeloffice.com) Cerebral Hut is a kinetic installation that works with an interface that measures brain frequencies and turns them into a reactive environment. It was initially on view in the Fall of 2012 at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, as part of the Istanbul Design Biennial. Its second installment happened in Saatchi Gallery in London during August 2013, as a part of “Red Never Follows” exhibition sponsored by the fashion brand Hugo.
Cerebral Hut is an interactive installation that explores the relationship between architecture, movement and human thought. We traditionally assume that the built environment, whether in the architectural or the urban scale influences our psyche. What if we can reverse that relationship? What if a kinetic architecture could establish a direct connection between the thoughts of its user and itself in order to reconfigure its physical boundaries accordingly?
Credits:
Design, Research: Guvenc Ozel, Alexandr Karaivanov
Programming, Mechanical Design: Jona Hoier (Istanbul), Peter Innerhofer (Istanbul), Jaak Kaevats (London), Onur Sonmez (London)
Installation Team: Guvenc Ozel, Alexandr Karaivanov, Lena Krivanek, Peter Innerhofer, Philipp Reinsberg.
Photographer: Bengt Stiller
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source: my-event

L’architecte turque Givenc Ozel en collaboration avec le designer Alexander Karaivanoc et les artistes Jona Hoier and Peter Innerhofer ont inventé la hutte cérébrale. Cette structure géométrique formée par plusieurs pans mobiles a la particularité de réagir aux pensées humaines. Munis d’un casque relié à l’œuvre, les spectateurs pouvaient interagir avec elle.

Grâce à leur concentration, les pans de la structure oscillent en accord avec nos pensées. À quand la possibilité de déplacer un objet dans la vie de tous les jours simplement grâce à nos pensées ? La question reste en suspens mais l’art remplit ici sa fonction en ouvrant un nouveau champ des possibles.

In neuroscience, an “evoked potential” is the electrical response detected from the brain as a result of a sensory stimulus. Architecture has the potential to become a form of technology that triggers a discernable cue through a feedback loop between a spatial configuration and the human senses, directly. An android is a robot that resembles a human. The architecture of the twenty-first century is an android. It is the real-time spatial reflection of the human mind in constructed matter. On Form and Complexity

In its essence, the role of the architect is organizing and composing the material world. The principles of this organization rely heavily on social behavior and the changing paradigms of human interaction. As a composer of materiality, the twenty-first century architect needs to re-prioritize the concerns of design, as the exactitude of geometry no longer stands as a true reflection of human intellect. Rather, architects need to find methods to organize material behavior transformatively and reactively.

Many contemporary practices of our generation are using coding, robotic fabrication and other digital/physical translation tools to infinitesimally vary methods of material organization and complexity. But how do we define the behavioral aspects of architectural form? The static nature of form “encodes” movement in itself but is incapable of rearranging its material constitution due to environmental factors. As we attempt to translate the “animate” into the material and vice versa, we submit to the twentieth century notion of modernism where the designer organizes material conclusively, which in return is expected to have definitive phenomenological outputs. This form of determinism is no longer an accurate reflection of contemporary society. The only constant of architecture is its vis-a vis relationship to culture, not its permanence. In fact, there’s no potential of form, affect, and materiality, unless form is liberated from Form to create an architecture which becomes an interface itself that fuses the human mind with space.

On Form without Form

Liberation of form from Form is the liberation of architecture from its physical context and the outside forces that determine its boundaries; a space that has silhouette but no figure. A kinetic architecture, by its ephemeral, seemingly amorphous yet programmed behavioral iterations is bound to travel between a multiplicity of contexts. An architecture with a transforming design boundary with its outside world continuously contextualizes its context and content meanwhile disperses it. By allowing itself to be shaped by multiplicity of external forces, it gives form to its user and his/her environment. Form without form is not form without context, content or intent. It is design-space that temporally re-calibrates its relationship with the outside world, repeatedly and through time, by actively transforming its physical and conceptual boundaries, meanwhile simultaneously translating its phenomenological perception by the user. That is precisely why Cerebral Hut is content without context par excellence, as context is not a paradigmatic constant.

On Space as Autonomous Intellect, or Architecture as Android

Looking at the historic evolution of technology reveals an aspiration to place consciousness into matter in order to create tools that are subservient yet autonomous from humans. Architecture as a form of technology does not exist outside of this cultural aspiration. Our scientific exploration of nature through physics, mathematics and material sciences lead to the formation of quasi-intelligent abstract systems in the realm of simulation and computation. These scientific paradigms have had a tremendous influence on contemporary design methodology, theory and critique. Current interest in robotics and sensing technology is an extension of this desire to transform architecture into an intelligent form of technology that can autonomously negotiate between the body, human psyche, the environment and other organisms. These contemporary influences of technological thinking affect both the “software” (as in design intent) and the “hardware” (as in formal, organizational and structural logic) of design.

Can Artificial Intelligence be a field of study that extends into the built environment? Is there a way to fuse architecture with technology so that space itself becomes the medium that interfaces between social and material worlds, real time? Can architecture itself become the Artificial Intelligence that understands and responds to us? The answers to these questions carry the vital link currently absent between the material and the virtual worlds, required for creating the construct of reality for the upcoming cycle of intellectual evolution. Through exploring the intersection of technology and space, we can achieve an Android Architecture that has an “intelligent software” and a “responsive hardware” in synchronization and dialogue with the human mind.

Cerebral Hut: A Primitive Cyborg

A cyborg is a robot that constitutes of both human and artificial parts. Cerebral Hut is a robot built as space. It is an environment that is calibrated and synchronized with intangible phenomena such as “thoughts.” It is dependent on human mental input to come to life. Formally, the overall geometric construct of Cerebral Hut is based on the rejection of simulated complexity that we are so fond of in the contemporary design world. Instead of attempting yet another representational recurrence of complexity, it uses, or borrows anonymous form, such as an Archimedean solid. The input from user participation becomes the primary agent that determines formal iteration, richness and variation. In order to create a space that is reactive to brain activity, a commercially available EEG device (an Electroencephalography helmet) was hacked that can detect and measure concentration levels and blinking, communicating wirelessly with a computer. This computer, through coding, interprets these data sets from the user’s brain waves and activates scripts that controls an electromechanical system to achieve a volumetric transformation . As a result, Cerebral Hut becomes a game-space where the user controls the physical boundaries of the environment by his/her thoughts. As the user engages in activities that increases concentration levels, the environment responds real time and changes its formal configuration.

Cerebral Hut is an exploration on building the foundation of a reactive architecture that directly responds to the human psyche. It creates a collective architectural form in constant transformation, composed of the mental traces of its users embedded in its physicality. As a form of kinetic architecture, it has no final, or ideal design-form, its interior and exterior is in constant transformation triggered by user participation. It paves the way for a form of artificial intelligence that embodies space, human and robot simultaneously.
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source: auduclaedu

Güvenç Özel is an architect, artist and researcher. He is the Technology Director of IDEAS, and the principal of Ozel Office, an interdisciplinary design practice located in Los Angeles, USA, working at the intersection of architecture, technology, visual arts and research on urban culture. A native of Izmir, Turkey, Özel studied architecture, sculpture, and philosophy in Bennington College, USA. In addition, he holds a Masters of Architecture degree from Yale University, where he graduated with multiple awards. Prior to establishing his own practice, he worked in the architecture offices of Rafael Vinoly, Jürgen Mayer H. and Frank Gehry, amongst others. His projects and experimental installations are exhibited in museums and galleries in the USA and Europe. He formerly taught at Yale University, Woodbury University and University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Studio Greg Lynn. His recent work has been heavily published by CNN, Boston Globe, Architectural Digest, Gizmodo, Creators Project/ Vice, Archdaily, Archinect, Designboom and many others. His current research on emerging technologies is focused on creating interactive environments that challenge traditional fabrication techniques and spatial assemblies.

IDEAS Technology Director Guvenc Ozel is exhibiting his interactive installation Cerebral Hut at the Saatchi Gallery in London as a part of a group exhibition called Red Never Follows sponsored by the fashion brand Hugo Boss. The exhibition on view from July 31 – August 31, 2013 showcases twenty international artists and designers exploring the theme of urban creativity. The installation is an immersive environment that is controlled through an interface that reacts to brain activities of the participants and changes shape accordingly.