A Stroll, A Fun Palace

A Stroll,
A Fun Palace
Interactive Installation
Swiss Pavilion - 2014 Venice Biennale
Re: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace [1961-64]
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Project Directors
Sandro Marpillero
Cristina Barbiani
Consultants
Angela Vettese
Renato Bocchi
Students Master MIA - IUAV
Marco Miscioscia
Cristian Rizzuti
Morena Sarzo
Damiano Ascenzi
Giovanbattista Mollo
This work is a collaboration between Sandro Marpillero and a group
of students of the Master of Interactive Arts at IUAV, coordinated
by Cristina Barbiani.
The project is about activating the Swiss Pavilion at the 2014 Biennale,
with an interactive installation in relation to Cedric Price’s project for
the Fun Palace (1961-64).
Sandro Marpillero initiated this project as a parallel activity to his
role of design instructor (with Angela Vettese, Valeria Burgio, Renato
Bocchi) at the Biennale-related post-graduate level IUAV/Workshop
If Clause - Archiving the Impossible, which was connected to the Swiss
Pavilion’s “School of Tomorrow” directed by Lorenza Baroncelli.
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This text still reflects the phase of
work before the actual interactive
installation took place. The event
took place on November 16,
2014 at the Swiss Pavilion with
a schedule that alternated its
performance with the dramaturgy
already established by the
exhibition’s curators and team of
invited artists/architects.
We are including a preliminary
documentation of the event,
the second part remains an
explanation of its technology and
critical intent.
We will substitute a new
introduction text with captions
for each image are currently
being edited. All recipients of
this booklet will be notified as
soon as it is available and receive
a substitute copy.
The event took place at the Swiss Pavilion
on November 16, 2014
These notes illustrate a video which documents the rehearsal of an interactive installation at the 2014
Biennale’s Swiss Pavilion, an experiment about exhibition formats activating the visitor’s experience of time.
A virtual recreation of the plan of Cedric Price’s (CP) Fun Palace (FP) on the floor of the Gallery allows a
visitor to dynamically interact with the project’s main elements. Each movement taking place within the
space of a not-visible outline of the building results in a musical performance, which is digitally mapped
and eventually archived as part of the exhibition’s ongoing activities.
The video that complements these notes records the actions of two dancers, also showing a simple notational
system conceived on the basis of the FP’s plan, identifying four kinds of programmatic spaces which,
interpreted as “audio environments,” structure the musical score of a visitor’s performance.
The interactive installation engages the FP as a conceptual springboard for testing the shift from the
theatrical impulse that inspired CP’s project, towards a contemporary activation of its relative indeterminacy
through digital technologies, addressing the FP as an idea on which to accumulate and stratify multiple
experiences, thus enlarging the radius of its architectural reach.
This work embraces CP’s challenge to conventional notions of architecture through the use of technology,
by demonstrating the impact of media apparatuses that were not available in CP’s time, as a way to bring
forward his critique to the inadequacy of the conventional actions that bring a building into existence.
These notes and the video of the installation result from our participation in the institutional experiment of
the “School of Tomorrow,” which prompted a desire to further explore modes of interaction with the space
and material on display at the Pavilion. The goal has been to contribute to the conversation promoted by
the overall curatorial agenda of “A Stroll Through a Fun Palace.”
Sandro Marpillero
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Proposal #2
Proposal #2 was not activated due to the ongoing uncertainties about
restrictions of time imposed on us by the Pavilion. In other words,
the full scope of our “Interactive Installation” was de facto curtailed
in its full potential by organisational limits and their impact in terms
of the complexity of possible “experiments” and “explanations” that
could be carried through. Not only we could have activated “Proposal
#2”, but also set up other conceptual ideas and small items, which
visitors could add to the great experience that they already had.
Proposal #2 points to the possibility of launching a further phase of
investigation, about the relationship between architecture and interactive
media, proposing to use the Fun Palace as a very rich source of inspiration.
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Fun Palace, Cedric Price (CCA)
1
Proposal #2
Equipment Set ‐Up
Proposal #2
Active Fields of Movement
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1
Proposal #2
Elements and “Audio Environments”
A New Fun Palace, Jehyun lee
Proposal #2
Elements’ Coordinates of Movement
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The Display
In the context of the 2014 Biennale, the Swiss Pavilion celebrates the
50th anniversary of the FP, as a “fundamental” shift in architectural
paradigms. As a project, the FP radically promoted new rituals of
cultural production and reception, by conceiving a flexible building
program, and allowing visitors to determine (or at least to affect)
what could take place within the space/time of their experience of
its spaces.
The material on display at the Pavilion is not a reproduction of that
which is in the CCA’s archive, but a representation of it, insofar as
it is a performance on the idea of archive that uses reproductions
of drawings and documents. The FP’s physical model is the only
original material on permanent display in the Pavilion’s Gallery,
where ETH students bring out some of the reproductions, recovered
from an Archive set up next to that space, to partially illustrate
them to visitors.
It is understood that the display feature of the trolleys, shooting out
from the archive in an almost-empty space, is about establishing
a possible conversation. The resulting dramaturgy encourages each
visitor to make sense, on one’s own terms, of the material on exhibit,
although the situation encountered upon entering the Gallery may
at first have been disorienting.
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Electronic Update
The FP was meant to be an experimental and interactive building,
transforming the role of a user by introducing a certain degree
of controlled uncertainty in the outcome of each visit, through
the spatial variability of many components, which performed
different roles through flexible programming. There were two broad
categories of total or partial enclosures, in relation to the scale of
their volumes, and the degree of required servicing.
Our installation complements the Pavilion’s highly curated agenda
of “revealing” the materials from the CCA’s archive, by offering to
unprepared visitors the role of active participants. Visitors find
themselves immersed in a time-based experiment that transforms
them into the generative centers of interaction with the material on
display, and the space of the Gallery itself.
Fun Palace, Cedric Price (CCA)
To achieve this, we installed a Kinect on the central truss of the
gallery. This is a piece of equipment that operates as a natural
user interface, and is capable of activating a computer program
by registering the gestures that take place within its spatial cone
of capture. It relies on an infrared projector, camera, and special
microchip to track the movement of objects and individuals in three
dimensions.
Kin-ect is a portmenteau word, which results from the combination
of the notions of “kinetic” and “connect,” both of which belong to,
and define, a key aspect of the installation.
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Activities as “Audio Environments”
To translate the Kinect’s data into a performative set-up we focused
on one among the many existing plans of the FP, in which “programmatic
boxes” are variably distributed on different levels within the
open framework defined by service columns and the top gantry.
The plan’s flexibility is a combination of the different programs
taking place within each enclosed space. Yet it is also significant
that the “programmatic boxes” are offered to a visitor in a variable
sequence, through the availability of multiple trajectories of movement,
therefore introducing further degrees of flexibility in relation
to time, opening up a user’s range of opportunities.
Fun Palace, Cedric Price, 1961
Our diagrammatic interpretation of the FP’s plan identifies four types
of program spaces, qualifying them for feeding, thinking, sharing,
and entertainment. They are assumed as “audio environments” and
used as the basis for different sound attributes, generating a flow
of atmospheric characteristics that structure a virtual appropriation
of the FP’s open-ended experience.
This set-up defines a field within the Gallery, corresponding to the
FP’s footprint, so that a computer equipment connected with the
Kinect can trace the actions performed by individual visitors. This
produces a record of their movements, by correlating them to a
musical composition, which in turn can be fed into the Pavilion’s
Archive.
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Projection
The not-visible plan of the FP is recreated on the gallery’s floor
through the Kinect’s infrared projection, which activates the diagrammatic
mapping of the FP’s plan as a visitor’s trajectory of
movement enters into it.
This open structure, controlled “from above” creates a physical engagement
with the FP’s conceptual field of opportunities, in a way
that is different from the Pavilion’s current choreographed interaction
with the material from the Archive (drawings, model).
Our installation promotes an imaginary register of interaction, with
the goal of effecting an encounter between visitors and the FP’s architecture.
The encouragement to stroll into a situation characterized
by uncertainty about what is visible on display outlines a path
that conceptually transforms the Gallery’s space into a distinctive
environment, in itself a new “Fun Palace” akin to CP’s project.
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Pixelation and Dance
The video illustrates the potential of such interaction, which could
be extended from the performers acting in it to all visitors. This
happens in both of the two modalities of fruition already set up in
the Gallery: in full light and darkness, once the clerestory window‘s
curtains are lowered. The image on the top of this page shows
a body crossing the threshold of the Kinect’s field, rendering it
through “pixelation,” to represent its tracking via a feature extraction
of 20 joints/person.
In the fully lit Gallery, visitors enter the Kinect’s cast projection,
generating with their movements a new virtual mode of inhabiting
the space under the pre-eminent effects of musical variations. This
qualitative engagement with the “audio environment” of different
areas, creates a layered score of time signatures and complex musical
meters.
If architecture engages the experience of space and time, and music
works on time through its variable pitch, duration, and dynamics,
dance deploys bodily movements within these frameworks. The
video, in turn, scripts this layered media openness, emphasizing
the convergence of indeterminate compositions and non-linear narratives,
making apparent their imaginary irruption into the Gallery’s
space.
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Tracing Movements
While the choreography of trolleys set up in the Pavilion establishes
a relationship between visitors and archival reproductions, the darkening
of the Gallery induces a more direct engagement with the
physical model. Music and moving projections cast, on the model
and through its plexiglass box, colored lights and patterns towards
the Gallery’s walls.
In our installation, the projected images are linked to the computer
that has already traced a visitor’s movements, and continues to
produce a mapping-in-evolution. This sets up a conceptually layered
connection with the experience of the Gallery’s space, charging
with multiple interpretations a conventional mode of architectural
representation such as a scaled model, through the dynamics of
diagrammatic interferences and overlays.
Visitors begin to exert relative control on the correlation between
their movements and musical effects, while the projector can still
be moved in the Gallery’s space, variably engaging the presence
of the FP’s physical model. They also acquire consciousness that a
digital device is registering both movements and sound. However,
the tracing of dynamic projections, that invest the physical model
with light, offers only at this moment hints about the possible
links that have been set between musical variations and the FP’s
programmatic areas.
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Activating the Archive
During the week of July 07-13, 2014, the IUAV participated in the
initiative “A School of Tomorrow” with a Workshop entitled If Clause
– Archiving the Impossible, during which post-graduate students
produced unreal and unfeasible projects for Venice. They invented
virtual identities of urban planners, conservative defenders of
the cultural heritage, political personalities and even past doges
by redesigning and falsifying archives, and manipulating their
documents to build up alternative future scenarios.
The Workshop’s outcome was collected in boxes of the same size and
material as those of the Pavilion’s Archive, although their content
explored multiple techniques of representation, from conceptual
models to unfolding display surfaces for multi-scaled artifacts,
pieces of board games, and vision apparatuses. Their presence
on the shelves of the Pavilion’s Archive sets up a first degree of
dialogue with the logic of the exhibition’s agenda.
The interactive installation, documented by the video and these
notes, produces instead a printout of the tracing already visible on
the computer screen, which constitutes a real-time document of
each visitor’s movement. This information is saved both digitally
and in physical form, offering another instance of, and a new record
for, the Pavilion’s “living archive.”
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Individualized Records
The map of each visitor’s movements, printed on acetate, can be
overlapped to a diagram of the FP’s programmatic environments,
allowing to reconstruct the logic that generated a musical output.
This physical overlay is a “score” of what has been played, whose
aural experience will remain embedded in each spectator’s memory.
The video documents the possibility of archiving all these variables,
in a synthetic narrative.
For Joan Littlewood and CP, the FP would be fun if the visitor could
be stimulated or informed, react or interact with an architecture
that supports and enables activity. Fascination for technology was
for them a way to celebrate the possibilities of thoughtful environments,
that would learn from events occurring in them, yet also
react formally or mechanically to a given stimulus, by carrying
memory traces of their own responsiveness.
We believe that our interactive installation at the Swiss Pavilion
takes on this mandate, explicitly linking a visit to the Gallery with
a “conscious distortion of time, distance, and size.” (CP, Snacks)
The video that complements these notes asserts a way of opening
up the time already distorted by the exhibition’s format, by keeping
“A Stroll” suspended yet also acted out into the Pavilion’s spaces,
and re-producing a spatio-temporal experience for each visitor. This
process of intensified interaction creates “A Fun Palace” on its own
terms, rather than a passage “through” a choreographed display of
CP’s radical project.
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