Entangling

_pix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:36:41 +0000

There are many worlds and many realities in our universe. When one reality, or one world-view is superimposed on another, it is inevitable that social, economic and cultural problems arise. Hierarchies of worlds are constructs of a bygone era. Ecologies of worlds should guide us in considering our future. We imagine this future to be responsive, adaptive and interconnected. We abandon the static and universal designs of the industrial era and move towards a world of malleable materials, objects and spaces. Where buildings can sustain themselves and replenish their environments, technologies can function as immune systems rather than panic attacks, materials are active, pliant and compostable. A world which all of us can influence and where entanglement and diversity are seen as positive things. We can begin by designing environments that can respond to physical, environmental, or social needs. Not only the needs of human beings, but also of the organisms and elements with whom we share the Biosphere. By accepting that our actions and our futures are deeply entwined with many others, we can glimpse the larger patterns of these connections.

At FoAM, we often work on entangling physical and digital realities. Exploring the relationships between materials and media opens up a wide continuum of 'mixing realities'. In this continuum, we are looking for ways to make digital media more tangible and physical materials more responsive and adaptive. We are looking for ways of giving our environments an ability to evolve, rather than constructing them to always remain the same. Rather than attempting to segment the world in chunks of 'things that are built and static' and 'things that are grown and evolving', we explore them as active and interacting elements of a whole. By designing systems which incorporate the grown, the built and the simulated, we have quickly reached the limits of reductionism and have began dabbling in the world of complexity. We have abandoned the modernist search for simplicity and began looking for clarity. In the process, instead of purity, we found fecundity.

FoAM - Interactive media

Entangling