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Sharing a room with artificial creatures

Responsive environment made with the Interactive Institute Smart Studio, servo, and Pablo Miranda (2002)

The Interactive Institute Smart studio developed this piece in collaboration with servo, a research and development collective in the field of experimental architecture. They designed the actual “lattice archipelogics”, a spatial arrangement of over a hundred large plastic modules, suspended from the ceiling. The Smart studio (and, in particular, Pablo Miranda) developed the “responsive field”, an artificial life algorithm which populates the modules with organically responsive clouds of light. The arrangement responds to the presence of visitors (using agents that live in a virtual space aligned with the physical location). As the agents move around in (transreal) space, they leave traces which form a kind of pathways in space - a morphogenical process similar to many naturally occuring phenomena such as the the formation of river canyons, paths in the forest, urban landscapes, etc. The paths affect the future movements of the light patterns.

My role in the project was part coordination and planning, part software/hardware interfacing and (some rather rudimentary) electronics design. Not to mention a painstaking manual labour making cables and actually installing the thing.

The Responsive Field of Lattice Archipelogics was originally shown in the Latent Utopias show in Graz, Austria, 2002. It was later shown in the exhibition Architectures Non Standard at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France (2003) and in the show Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It was awarded an honorary mention in Vida 5.0, a contest for art and artificial life (2002).

Interactive visitor environment (2003-2004).
Produced by the Interactive Institute.

When the steel factory in Avesta was moved to a new facility, the old factory was abandoned. The workers more or less dropped their tools and left. Ever since, the factory has been waiting by the riverside, its windows shattered and its looming passageways unvisited except by the ghosts of the past… until now.

Now the old steel works have been turned into a kind of industrial heritage museum. As a visitor you explore the building using special torchlights developed at the Interactive Insitute. There are a number of interactive pieces distributed in the building which try to give some kind of idea about what it might have been like in the blast furnace hall when it was operational (except we don’t actually have 1500° C molten iron - it just looks like it).

I did a bit of everything, from programming to rebuilding smoke machines and drilling ventilation holes in odd metal contraptions. The Verket was realized using the interaction engine called MIEL.

Verket was awarded the Nodem Award for large scale/immersive installations. (2004) and admitted to the Best in Heritage Club of Excellence (2005).