The way to get wonderfully lifelike behaviour is not to try to make a really complex creature, but to make a wonderfully rich environment for a simple creature. – David Ackley
Designed by Charikleia Kalamari the above-mentioned project is one of thirteen design responses to this year’s Inter 3 brief about energy as relationships. Moving away from heavy mainstream infrastructures students explored platforming technologies, unconventional laboratories and guerrilla compounds, partly commentary, partly speculative, partly culturally injected. We critically reviewed India’s sacred and scientific as well as high-tech and low-tech sides in order to understand and discuss via design the high-contrast scene and processes involved in energy extraction, exchange/transfer, manufacturing, final use/consumption and renewal/feedback loop.
Numerous time based prototypes were built throughout the year to test and explore energy relationships, effects and performatic behaviours. Design, build, test, simulate, fail, re-build, design again… solve by iteration. Digital and analogue, fabricating and DIY techniques were used in order to hack and tinker daily live objects from electronic toys, antique mobile phones, vintage computers and musical instruments. From these experimentations some strange-behaving creatures emerged which later on turned into fine tuned wonderful designs that dream, dance, live/die, grow and sing, forming peculiar ecologies of novel energy-beings.
Articulating the ordinary Alexey Marfin (above) designed an interactive threshold controlled by the use of mobile phones on the site of Mumbai’s notorious Chor Bazaar (‘thieves market’) based on the concept of DIY and a disassemble/re-assemble strategy. Basmah Kaki reinterpreted sound and wind energy on the site of a vast and bleak granite quarry in Bangalore where a delicate instrumental apparatus nests on a gargantuan carved-out mountain contrasting with the harsh mine environment and the exploitation of women and children.
Among the tales of biological exuberance, death and life energy cycles were re-assembled in fragile bacteria lagoon laboratories and blossoming uranium landscapes scripted in an altered flora. Digital dreams of augmented reality discussing the concept of virtual religious rituals; a sonic Hindu temple in the marshlands of a slum controlled by the flow and tuned by the purity of water; global energy hunters gathered around the fires of e-wasted Microsoft hills and Intel mountains in Mumbai’s biggest landfills… students unveiled stories of horror and hope.
Inhale. Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath and then just a bit longer… – Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk
INTER 3 students 2010-11: Alexey . Basmah . Enrique . Harikleia . Hessa . Ilina . Lee . Maria . Min . Nara . Nathalie . Sergej . Vasu
The way to get wonderfully lifelike behaviour is not to try to make a really complex creature, but to make a wonderfully rich environment for a simple creature.
ReplyDeleteooooooohhh I like that!!