MIT Media Lab, Stanford University
This work explores a dynamic future where the accessories we wear are no longer static, but are instead mobile, living objects on the body. Engineered with the functionality of 18 robotics, this “living” jewelry roams on unmodified clothing, changing location and reconfiguring appearance according to social context and enabling multitude presentations of self. With the addition of sensor devices, they transition into active devices which can react to environmental conditions. They can also be paired with existing mobile devices to become personalized on-body assistants to help complete tasks. Attached to garments, they generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs–creating a new, dynamic fashion.
It is our vision that in the future, these robots will be miniaturized to the extent that they can be seamlessly integrated into existing practices of body ornamentation. With the addition of kinetic capabilities, traditionally static jewelry and accessories will start displaying life-like qualities, learning, shifting, and reconfiguring to the needs and preferences of the wearer, also assisting in fluid presentation of self. We envision a new class of future wearables that possess hybrid qualities of the living and the crafted, creating a new on-body ecology for human-wearable symbiosis.

PLUG-IN ECOLOGY: Urban Farm Pod with Agronomy
The Plug-In Ecology; Urban Farm Pod is a “living” cabin for individuals and urban nuclear families to grow and provide for their daily vegetable needs. It is an interface with the city, potentially touching upon urban farming, air quality levels, DIY agronomy techniques in test tubes, algal energy production, and bioluminescent light sources, to name a few possibilities. It can be outfitted with a number of optional systems to adapt to different locations, lighting conditions, and habitation requirements. While agricultural food sources are usually invisible in cities such as New York, the pod archetype turns the food system itself into a visible artifact, a bio-informatic message system, and a functional space.

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum
Located adjacent to the picturesque Yanzi Lake in the Pingshan District of Shenzhen, the new 100,000m2 facility will be a world-class natural science museum dedicated to interpreting the laws of natural evolution, showing the geographies of Shenzhen and its ecology in a global perspective, and actively advocating science. The design extends the public park network and aims to maximise access to the lush green areas throughout with a range of activities dedicated to keeping the site open and active throughout the day – from early morning jogs to late evening strolls. This gives the opportunity for residents and visitors alike to enjoy and connect with nature.

Emotive city
Emotive City is a framework to explore a mobile and self-organizing model for the contemporary city. Models of the past are limited and should not operate, as blueprints for our urban future, a new generation of design enquiry by necessity must address the challenges of today. The fixed and finite tendencies that once served architecture and urbanism have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life, machines and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges with an environment of accelerated urbanization. We propose a framework that participates and engages with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives through a model of living that we call an adaptive ecology.

Vanishing Places
Vanishing Places is an audio-visual installation that investigates dialogues and tensions between the real and artificial. In keeping with the studios recent experiments with real-time generative visuals, Vanishing Places brings a new iteration of the intersection of digital life-simulating systems and organic interaction.

Project Orb[i]s
Orbis is a proposal for a Prototypical System, which is highly adaptive in nature, and creates an urban infrastructure that responds and caters to the changing needs and conditions within the city, by augmenting the everyday experiences and activities. Orb(i)s is a behavioral assembly that establishes the possibilities of a dynamic environment not limited to a building plan; rather, it is autonomous, adaptable, dynamic and self-assembling based on real-time data culminating in a constantly reconfiguring ecology. The sensing abilities of the system make it self-aware and encourage any decision-making, while its self-assembling quality arises from a unit-to-unit communication that leads to a higher order of organizations and structures.

DARK ECOLOGY

IsoScope

IsoScope is a kinetic audiovisual outdoor installation, a sensorial experience in which the audience wanders through rotating lights and an ever-changing sonic cloud. This new work by Dutch artist Joris Strijbos consists of multiple robotic wind objects interacting with each other and with their surroundings. Strijbos aimed at creating a human-constructed phenomenon, an abstract entity which, like most natural phenomena, can only be experienced in certain weather conditions. IsoScope can be seen as a proposition for a new kind of machinic and artificial lifeform. IsoScope was commissioned by Sonic Acts for the second Dark Ecology Journey (2015) and realised in collaboration with Jeroen Molenaar, Daan Johan and Erfan Abdi.

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

Necrocracy
HazMat Suits for Children
Questioning the division between the natural and the human inherited from the Romantic era, the works navigate between human manufacturing of petroleum-based products, ecology, and the geological chronology of oil.

Wave Atlas
Wave Atlas is a water world teeming with artificial digital life, which users simultaneously create and discover. The more users who interact, the richer and more complex this ecology grows.

Forced Landscape
Rachael Champion’s site-specific sculptures and installations are engaged in a discourse surrounding the dependant yet unclear relationship between industry, technology and nature. Her works consist of large scale constructions and dramatic architectural interventions that question the shifting interactions humanity has with the natural world and considers their boundaries, separations and progressive implications. Through manipulating information from diverse influences that include brutalist architecture, agriculture, raw materials, municipal infrastructure, public space and ecology, Champion questions the layered and dynamic complexities of our shifting physical environment.

Ecology and Planning Museums

Entering on the ground level to the ecology museum reveals a projection next to the restaurant and retail areas. an elevator takes guests to the top level where their descent through the three ecologies – earth to cosmos, earth to man, earth to earth – begins, connected through a series of ramps.
the earth to earth exhibit on the bottom floor features a plane that turns clockwise, moving slowly down towards the ocean ecology space appropriately situated under the reflecting pond of the exterior plaza. the earth to earth section contains four outdoor green terraces as temporary exhibit spaces that change with the seasons.The shared public square also marks the entrance to the planning museum where visitors are greeted by a large model of the eco-city and another temporary display area. a multimedia system makes the next sequence of program, the theory and practice zones, come to life with dynamic informative videos, images, and sounds, all located on the second level. mechanical escalators transport guests to the third floor where one-way display is turned into an interactive relationship with the viewer. this is accompanied by a 3D cinema and a restaurant with views out towards the sea. on the top storey one can find the green architecture, landscape and water resources exhibits as well as access to the vegetative roof-scape offering offering unmatched views.

Ecology Museum and Planning Museum

Steven Holl a été chargé de projeter deux édifices pour celle annoncée comme la première ville écologique de Chine, Tianjin Eco City, qui se dressera à 150 km de Pékin.
Considérés globalement, les deux projets de Steven Holl semblent centrés sur le concept du Yin et du Yang chinois. Les deux constructions, situées l?une en face de l?autre et séparées par un plan d?eau, sont complémentaires. L?Ecology Museum s?approprie des volumes soustraits au Planning Museum.
L?architecte a projeté un parcours d?exposition descendant pour l?Ecology Museum, grâce à un système de rampes : Earth to Cosmos, Earth to Man et Earth to Earth d?où les visiteurs accèdent à l?Ocean Ecology Exhibition s?étendant sous la place d?eau qui sépare les deux édifices.

ECTOPLASMATIC HOUSING
File Festival
‘Ectoplasmatic Housing’ aims to speculate about how architecture can mediate the pervasiveness of the contemporary ‘infocalypse’ age. An architectural experiment of physical and digital space through the use of interactive design and augmented reality.

Browsing through a domestic safari of Trojan savannas or sterilised virus forests while contemplating the emergence of thousands of cheap-friends-facebook flowers blossoming among the pulsating cocoons of dying obsolete apps… Quantum reality theories are ripe for the picking from wiki branches of tweeting pink daily hit dwarfing trees…
Ectoplasmatic Housing aims to speculate about how architecture can mediate the pervasiveness of the contemporary ‘infocalypse’ age. It cultivates data for a spatial interactive second nature manifestation. It grows, blossoms, dies and haunts. Overlayed with the physical this unstable ectoplasmatic nature may shift radically into a rapid nuke ecology of nightmares.