The Living, Breathing Wall

source: behnazfarahiprosite

Behnaz Farahi is a designer, architect, and Annenberg Fellow at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. She is interested in interactive environments and their relationship to the human body. In particular she is interested in the integrated application of material performance, and smart materials in contemporary art/architecture practice. Behnaz Farahi has an Undergraduate and two Masters degrees in Architecture, and is now a PhD candidate on the Media Arts and Practices program at USC.
Behnaz Farahi has also worked with Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis on a NASA funded research project developing a robot to print structures on the Moon.
Her work has been widely published and exhibited. It has been selected for Skyline2014 in Downtown Los Angeles, ACADIA 2013 conference in Canada, ‘Sight+ Sound+ Space’ iMAP exhibition in 2013, ‘Design Intelligence: Advanced Computational Research’ exhibition in Beijing in 2013, the ‘Encoding Architecture’ exhibition in Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. In 2013 she was awarded first prize for the Kinetic Art Organization international competition.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: behnazfarahiprosite

How might we imagine a space that can develop an understanding of its users through their sounds and movements and respond accordingly?
This installation is an attempt to address these question through the design of an interactive kinetic wall. One of the main contributions of this work is to explore how a physical environment can change its shape in response to the speech recognition of users. The central focus is the relationship between materials, form and interactive systems of control. It is an attempt to explore how simple elements in our surroundings can change their physical configuration as we interact with them. The installation consists of ‘skin’ (Spandex), ‘bones’ (aluminum strands), and ‘muscles’ (shape memory alloy springs) augmented with a ‘brain’ (Arduino micro-controller, and Kinect ).