John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

art is a form of media art that integrates art and technology as well as design,
entertainment, and popular culture targeted at audiences beyond galleries or
museums through mass production and commercial distribution. This includes
contemplative, functional and interactive objects that are hybrids of products,
toys, and sculpture. This would include autonomous objects such as Maywa
Denki’s ‘Sei-Gyo’ (‘Holy Fish’) a fish-controlled vehicle that moves in the same
direction that it’s ‘driver’ swims and Ken Rinaldo’s ‘Autotelematic Spider Bots’
that interact with their human observers, each other and their environment.
Another example would be Roxy Paine's art-making machine ‘SCUMAK’ that
fabricates 'sculptures' at the rate of one per day from molten low-density
polyethylene. These projects express alternate standards to the dominant
values of established art and design discourses. Guinea Pig Design’s ‘…inside
the box’ objects would also fit comfortably within this category.
The conjunction of ‘building design’ and ‘not building design’ suggests the
development of new forms of technological engagement of space in new ways
beyond designing and making buildings. Lucy Bullivant has described this as
‘4dspace’ (Bullivant, 2005) - emerging practices in interactive architecture that
make use of various technologies such as sensing mechanisms as a 4 th timebased
dimension. She has also written about ‘Responsive Environments’
(Bullivant, 2006) that interact with the people who use them. Examples of
these would be Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s ‘Blur Building’ (Diller
and Scofidio, 2002) that was regulated by an array of sensors which responded
to the conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction to adjust
the nozzles and maintain a cloud of water vapour around the structure. Also ‘Dtower’
by Lars Spuybroek and artist Q. S. Serafijn that maps and displays the
emotions of the local community by changing colour in response to surveys
conducted of fifty local residents on the internet. And ‘Blusher’ by architectural
collective sixteen*(makers) is a gallery-based installation that incorporates
embedded sensing and actuation technologies that changes its configuration
based on the proximity of the audience. Another example would be
‘HypoSurface’ that was developed by the architectural/design practice dECOi.
This project operates through a matrix of actuators and responds to the sound
and movement of it’s with its audience or users.
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