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.

Digital Substance

The parametric technology allows to generate a self-organizing system, that is, to open the essence of the universe as an infinite variety of possible self-organizing systems. The world is in constant process of self-development, but it is not chaos and not a set of known forms (cube, sphere, cylinder, from which you can build everything as Cezanne believed). Everything in the world (in the physical, biological and other reality) is in fluid, flexible, flowing, accelerating and decelerating movements that create tension, tears, force fields. And they are amazingly beautiful (attractors and fractals are their individual symptoms) and they exist before form and after form. It is not a solid, or lines in a space, but something that stands before and after the space.

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again

The kinetic installation “Putting the Pieces Back Together Again” is a complex system with self-organizing and emergent behaviour, at the same time it is an artistic inquiry and meditation on contemporary scientific methodology. The installation investigates non-hierarchical communication and collective behaviour by implementing such a system physically through many electro-mechanical actors.
The Installation consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid of two by two meters. Each motor is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic glass. The radii of the pointers are chosen to intersect with the pointers of its neighbours. All motors are excited with the same alternating current that let them move initially in a random direction. Each actor is at the same time sensing its environment. In the event of a collision the pointers reverse their turning direction. This is achieved through a custom motor control circuit. Through the interplay of many entities a complex behaviour emerges on the surface of the installation. By manipulating the signals during runtime the system will form spontaneous pattern on its surface. It seems like they are negotiating it’s position with nearby actors. By this the system is showing behaviour of self-organization. The installation drifts through various activation levels during its run time by this it constantly evolves new formations and constellations (crystallization).

Public Epidemic Nº 1 (Bacterial Orchestra)
Олле и Любке
FILE FESTIVAL

“Bacterial Orchestra” (2006), a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism where each cell lives on an Apple iPhone (it can be ported to any mobile phone, but the iPhone was chosen because it’s popular and the centralized App Store makes it easy for the epidemic to spread). That way, hundreds of people can gather with their mobiles and together create a musical organism. It will evolve organically in the same way as “Bacterial Orchestra”, but it will also be much more infectious. The installation and the ideas behind it can be traced from different areas such as chaos theory, self-organizing systems and neural networks. The goal? A world wide sound pandemic, of course.