GrandTour
![](images/star2.gif)
发贴: 198
|
2008-08-31 20:46
![收藏这篇帖子](http://abbs.cn/images/icons/icon_favorite.gif)
Radical Experimentation As Research: AVATAR
Spiller’s Bits
For four years, AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London has been advancing the ‘digital and visceral terrain’. As its main exponent, Neil Spiller explains how its preoccupations fan out far beyond the merely technological, encompassing the aesthetic, philosophical and the natural, enabling it to question current stylistic tyrannies in architecture.
The Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) Group (www.avatarlondon.org) was founded, it must be said, by me, in September 2004 at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Its agenda is to explore all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. AVATAR also has a dedicated Masters/Phd by Design route for students.
AVATAR is fundamentally interested in research concerning the impact of advanced technology on architectural design. However, it also contributes to discussion on issues such as aesthetics, philosophy and cybernetics.
Technologically, AVATAR concerns itself with virtuality (exploring fully immersed, mixed and augmented environments), time-based new media (film, animation and film theory), and nano- and biotechnology (micro landscapes and architecture, ethics, sustainability and ecology) including reflexive environments and cybernetic systems.
Philosophically and artistically, AVATAR is convinced that new technologies prompt a re-evaluation of Surrealist spatial protocols and tactics. It also believes that Alfred Jarry’s proto-Surrealist poetic pseudo-science of pataphysics and its idea of the clinamen –the swerve (chance) – has great import on what we do. The choreography of digitally enabled chance allows us to create architecture of blossoming possibility where events are fleeting, exceptional and particular.
Narratively and aesthetically, AVATAR considers itself uniquely skilled and positioned to posit new aesthetic systems and codes of representation for architecture, interior design,multimedia design and graphic design.The most important paradigm shift sustained by new media and technologies,with their consequent ubiquity, is that of the liberation of the user from the stylistic and spatial dictates of aesthetic fascists like architects, politicians and planners. As this century progresses, this tyranny will become less and less legislated. The ability of users to configure spaces that are mnemonic, high and low coded, personal and transmittable is swiftly accelerating. Music appreciation, for example, has become an evolving virtual terrain: music collections can be invisible, remixed, shared, distributed around rooms as invisible but aural graffiti, playlisted to infinite satisfaction.
Geotags can be left all around the world to offer insight, polemic, warning and delight. We can make the traces of our lives readable as a new social archaeology.
Obviously the great paradox of our age, the prospect of surveillance, always makes us consider the ethics of careful, wise and informationally safe digital space.
In recent years it has become apparent that AVATAR’s work needs to explore issues of the performative, the locative, and the harnessing and husbandry of natural architectural systems. Glen Tomlin’s research focused on the myriad vectors and spaces, which are never seen nor appreciated, that are generated as a side-effect of the creation of a recognised masterpiece, in this case of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1909). Tomlin used nanotechnological implants located at an artist’s wrists, elbows and shoulders, thus as the work was in progress three other nested ‘paintings’ were generated.
The nanotechnological devices simultaneously acted as preventative medical sensors, assessing the health of the user’s bone marrow, blood constitution, muscle fibre and nervous system. The project, backed up with extensive technical and medical analysis, revealed a series of architectural spaces that could be provoked, interacted with or used to drive other architectures.
Christian Kerrigan’s work is predicated on the fact that putting metal corsets around growing trees encourages the growth of timber that has a higher density and can therefore be used more effectively to construct things. This extreme bonsai technique can utilise other technologies, such as nanotechnology, to create within sections of trees a sort of Purist composition of as yet unseen growing and harvestable objects. In short Kerrigan’s project harvests the growth imperative of trees, such as a yew tree copse, to grow a ship, and has a life span of more than 200 years as the copse/ship/launching pier grows – an architecture before an architecture fuelled by the natural power of growth.
Advanced technology brings together many things that have previously been seen as separate and bounded, for example softness and engineering through genetic manipulation. AVATAR is therefore convinced of the value of what Louis Aragon, the Surrealist writer,called the psycho-magical operations of collage. Indeed, collageorientated thought patterns are often responsible for the creative insight of a project, and allow a designer to think out of the box. The projects illustrated here do just that, and were instigated by such synthetic notions. Architecture is no longer a discrete discipline: everything is up for grabs.
Professor Neil Spiller is Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory and Vice Dean at the Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment, University College London.
GrandTour edited on 2008-09-01 19:05
|