The Textile Room

Los Angeles-based P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S is among the most intriguing and progressive firms working in architecture today. They seem relentless in pushing boundaries in areas like ultra-light-weight high-tech materials and immersive media. They are also very thoughtful and patient in the way they approach design.This is good because what they are engaged in and the way they work takes time. By collaborating with engineers and innovators in different industries they are slowly changing the way architecture is carried out and conceived on material and ontological levels. They don’t do spec homes, they do what’s new, and sometimes try to do what hasn’t been done yet.

micro | macro
micro | macro transforms Hall E in the MuseumsQuartier into an oversized world of moving images and sounds. In his immersive installation, multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda creates a field of imagination between quantum physics, empirical experimentation and human perception. In collaboration with nuclear scientists at CERN, Ikeda has translated complex physical theories into a sensory experience. The Planck scale is used by scientists to denote extremely small lengths or time intervals. Concepts like space and time lose their meaning beyond this scale, and contemporary physics has to rely on speculative theories. And on art. Visitors to micro | macro enter a world of data, particles, light and sound that makes the extremes of the universe perceptible to the eye and ear. In the micro world we penetrate the smallest dimensions of the unrepresentable, while in the macro world we take off into cosmic expanses that allow us to experience the infinite space beyond the observable universe. In this maelstrom of data, an acoustic and visual firework bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and sensual perception.

Geist Rendern
RENDER GHOST ist eine kombinierte immersive Theaterarbeit aus virtueller Realität, die vom New Media Art Team NAXS CORP erstellt wurde. Die sechs teilnehmenden Zuschauer werden weiße, staubfreie Kleidung anziehen, und das Servicepersonal wird dabei helfen, Virtual-Reality-Ausrüstung zu tragen und langsam das weiße aufblasbare Zelt zu betreten. Angeführt von der virtuellen Szene werden sie um den Spiralturm herumgehen, um eine physische zu starten Science-Fiction-Zeremonie. Wenn der Betrachter auf die Spitze des Turms tritt, entfernt er seine Virtual-Reality-Ausrüstung und taucht in eine surreale Landschaft ein, die aus Lichtern, Lasern, Rauch, Geräuschen, schwebenden Partikeln und Wind besteht. Allmählich geriet er in Trance und Blitz Nebel.

WDCH Dreams
The Los Angeles Philharmonic collaborated with media artist Refik Anadol to celebrate our history and explore our future. Using machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team has developed a unique machine intelligence approach to the LA Phil digital archives – 45 terabytes of data. The results are stunning visualizations for WDCH Dreams, a project that was both a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior skin (Sept 28 – Oct 6, 2018) and a season-long immersive exhibition inside the building, in the Ira Gershwin Gallery.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Erratic Weather
Despite some world leaders skepticism, climate change is a reality and the world isn’t just warming, in some parts of the planet the weather is becoming more erratic. During the last years, our generation has started to observe the effects and consequences of this shift, witnessing violent and unexpected climate phenomenons. Erratic Weather is a digital art project aiming to represent changing atmospheric conditions into an immersive multimedia experience. During the performance, the system uses various source of weather information retrieved from an online database and processed on real time to generate a visual and a surround sound composition. During 30 minutes the audience will experience the life cycle of swirling phenomenons such typhoon, hurricane and tropical cyclone , demonstrating the devastating power of the nature and the emergency to preserve it.

Turbulence
TURBULENCE is an ongoing series of immersive experiences created for large-scale, high-resolution media environments that embosom the viewer in digital flow of particles.It’s a set of visual experiments on particles simulated in different virtual environments.

Shifting Intimacies
An interactive/media artwork for one person at a time. Each participant enters a large, dark space containing two circles of projected film imagery presented within an immersive sound environment. One image floats upon a disc of white sand and the other on a circle of white dust. Participants’ movements direct and affect the filmic image and spatialised audio experience. Throughout the work a layer of dust (an artificial life form) slowly eats away and infuses itself deep into the imagery and sound. Each person has 10 minutes alone with the work. Their movement through the space continually affects speed, quality, balance and flow within the work. At the end of the experience they are invited to climb a lit platform and cast dust back onto the images below.

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
the event of a thread
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

Data.scape
Permanent Installation
Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.

flicker

Flicker is an immersive electronic environment of generative image and sound. A collaborative work with Oliver Bown. Based on biological models of firefly behaviour, Flicker generates an ever shifting rhythmic, meditative environment to the viewer. Flicker uses 4 channels of synchronised high definition video and 8 channels of sound to immerse the viewer in a phenomenologically rich environment of artificial life. The work is a large-scale agent-based simulation, with each agent providing a rhythmic pulse at regular intervals. Agents try to synchronise their pulse with other agents in their immediate neighbourhood. The collective pulsations of groups of local agents are spatially sonified with int exhibition space. Over time, large groups synchronise at different rates, leading to complex visual and aural structures, syncopating and constant shifting in to a long term complexity.

MID AND PLAYMODES
radial and blaus
‘radial’ and ‘blaus’ are two interactive lighting installations, both a result of the collaboration between catalonia-based digital research collectives MID (media interactive design) and playmodes. ‘blaus’ introduces the abstract realm of three dimensional geometry through the mediums of audio and illumination – this could manifest as a cube or a blossoming flower, a grid or a jellyfish, a mutant framework of reflecting lights which submerge the audience into a multi-faceted universe, driven by hidden forces of the architecture. ‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate
intimately to impact on the visitor. the process led the designers to build most of the software and hardware elements themselves, by means of algorithm design, digital fabrication techniques and craft handwork. on the hardware side, the use of open source technologies, such as arduino, allowed us to create a flexible electronic system easily addressable by opensound – control data. ‘duration open source software by
james george was used in order to independently control, compose, and play a full score for the laser diodes, servomotors, lights and music.on the sound design side, all music and sound effects are made through the use of audio programming environments such as predate and reactor.
custom digital instruments are made in order to exactly match the resonant frequency of the space and its harmonics.
‘blaus’ is an immersive space where audio-visual elements relate intimately to impact on the visitor.