Questions for RML

Question for Naut:

In virtual reality, immersion may have the strongest impact on our sensing system. However, video/audio systems in RML are not often seen in our daily lives. Is immersion kinda just enjoyed in labs/museum rather than in daily life?

Question for class:

I watched videos on Youtube. They're quite amazing. I didn't go to RML for some reason. I just want to ask what it is really like to be surrounded by the video/audio systems.

Questioning Presentation

Naut:

Despite the "transportability" of the performance black box, it seems to limit itself through dependence on its own rigid parameters. One ends up moving the box around to different places without push-back from location, limiting the ability of the performance to connect. Is there a desire to remove the walls of the box and embed the performance in a more site specific way? Does the technology exist for speakers to become sound emitting surfaces, in the same way projections can become light emitting surfaces (LED walls).

Class:

Do you find a limitation of video being distortion? Meaning, much of the visual presentation we saw seemed to be taken from original footage and then filtered, resulting in exercises of effect, without much thought to the original image. What do you think might happen if the original image was a creation in itself, rather than a representation?

RML Questions

Naut:

When I was at RML this time I was struck by how much I noticed the screen configuration. Maybe it was because I was lying on the floor and looking up, but I kept noticing where the video screens ended. What do you think is the future of the immersive video space? Are there experiments to cover a 270 degree globe with video, so that it appears all around you, so that when you look up you only see the show? So, in affect, a 1 spherical screen display instead of 10 (or 20 or 30) individual screens?

Class:

The sorts of spaces RML provides are extremely rare in this country and almost never make it out of the "art space", and they often become concert halls of the digital and the experimental. Do you see a way in which RML can move out of its limited exposure and somewhat underground way of doing things to a wider acceptance and interest in our culture?

Naut Humon

To Naut:
What does the potential for such a technical audiovisual experience reveal about the future of performance and entertainment? Do you see this technology expanding more into the realm of the festival/performance or museum?

To the class:
Is this more than just the spectacle? Can such an audiovisual experience teach us about our experiences with sight and sound and how they are interrelated and different? With expanding technologies will the manipulation of sounds become more exact or will our own inability to truly listen limit our ability to control the subtleties of sound the way we have the subtleties of light and color in video.

Haut Humon,

Wow, I'm probably never going to have the same appreciation for my stereo system again ...but thanks for the tour!! My my friend Calvin Turnbull owns a recording studio in Casper CA. He doesn't have the video equipment as your Recombinant Lab but he stays pretty bust recording independent artists that use the Internet for distribution. My question is with all the uncertainty of profit in the music industry these days re spaces like yours more likely to attract smaller less known artist or is it too expensive for anyone other than corporate benefactors and elite artists?

Class 

Do these creations reflect and reproduce the ideologies of an elite culture of eccentric artist and patrons rich enough to access the equipment or will we see a growing number of media labs where society can go enjoy a growing catalog of art and construct it's own ideological meanings from them.

Giant Robot

Sorry this is so belated, I messed up the order of the posts.

Question for Greg Lynn:
You refer to your work as affordable, but the word in your terms seems to connote reproducibility and commodity rather than actual affordability. Is putting out a line of cutlery or home goods considered affordable just because it might be available on an open market rather than acquired through special order?

Question to class:
Is Greg Lynn's work more exclusive or inclusive of architectural practices today? Is his use of technology in place of people in addition to advanced rendering systems and animation programs a form of exclusive practice or is he opening the field up to people with strong experience in visual realms?

Questions for Greg Lynn

For Lynn

Theories of emergence are mentioned in Blobs. You prefer an experimental architecture. But in terms of real-life dynamic moving architecture, where are we? Do you ever think about putting them into our real life?

For class

Greg Lynn's ideas of dynamic moving architecture are really great! But are they just another form of art? Or what can we find beyond that?

Lynn -

If taking a blob-y approach to design generates a process of thought that is neither "reducing towards primitives nor emerging towards wholes", where does this leave the organization of information as an abstract concept in these systems? That is, generating any information container, from a house to a database to a model to a robot, creates inherent problems for how information is shared between actors in or users of a system. As I traditionally have understood it as a non-architect, architecture seems to be an elegant way to organize the social information of our lives, whether as living space, model or art. Does the generating design using blogs do away with this information aspect of spacial organization, or do we have to recontextualize our thinking on this?

Class -

Is Lynn's approach to architecture, seeming to be at the most abstract and high level, typical of the way most architects think about their work? If so, where is the space for human actors/inhabitants in a world where the abstract process and principles of design seem to trump everything else when creating a model of a space?

Mr. Roboto

so Class...

Is the Giant Robot studio a contradiction to the theories found in Fold, Bodies and Blob? If in the article the argument is that design should be animate by a design informed by the complexity of an agglomeration of multiple vectors and systems, not to be confused with motion, where does the physical movement of architecture sit relative to this idea?

Dear Mr. Lynn

If architects are to take on the idea of motion as spectacle, where does this leave the profession as a discipline? Does this mean more specialization or less? It seems already that knowledge that an architect requires is expanding into other fields. Are the mechanics and engineering of kinetics to be apart of the profession or are architects meant to spread themselves thin?

design amplifier

q for Lynn:
can built form resolve the instability of a differentiating, robotized environment, and is the instability of form necessary?

q for discussion:
are architects the designers media-ting an architecture of motion?

Question for Greg Lynn

For the class


Blob is the representative model of his notion of ‘complexity.’ He says ‘complexity is not only always present as potential in even the most simple or primitive of forms. It is measured by the degree of both continuity and difference that are copresent at any moment.’
I can easily come up with the movement of lava lamp. One thing I am curious is why the blob need to have those highly developed complexity. What kind of adjacent forces does he think? I know his is focusing on form. But I think he need to be clear about the force because he want to make a form transforming by the external or internal force. We can simulate the transformation of form. But when we simulate the momentum, we need to define what it is.


For the lecture

By scanning his recent study and works in his robot Vienna studio, it seems he has been developing the notion of the ‘architecture smooth’- the mixtures are made up of disparate element which maintain their integrity in his discipline.

At this point, one thing I want to ask is the value of human environment as the gigantic robot which is functioning as a whole system. I assume the robot architecture is under total control as a whole both in terms of form and system. There is no temporal variation or evolution he already mentioned. Only fixed mechanism by the performance that robot creator already measured functions in the robot architecture. Then, what is its real advantage beyond making and showing of the entity?

It might be transformation, morphological response to external factors. However, from his previous conceptional works and theory, I expected more than recent work. I might have expected he could realize his ‘blob within influence’ as the spontaneous momentum and autogenous effects rather than extremely calculated mechanism.

The reason his imagination in written work was attractive to me is he was picturing semi-biological images. And I am curious now. Does architecture also need to follow the track of mechanics for the sake of realizing the dream, environment with vitality?

Questions for Greg Lynn

Question for Mr. Lynn:
Conceding to motivations in your own work which consider forces that act on and within formal systems of geometric complexity, enacting something between top-down and bottom up organizations, do you think dimension, the spatial metric, becomes important at some point as a way of bringing projects out of the computer? Especially as materiality and physical manifestation depend on it.

Question for the class:
Is geometric complexity and dynamic behavior capable of being inhabitable or is it just a form of spectacle that is merely participatory as with Lynn's robots? If not currently, can it become inhabitable? What are the spatial potentials of these complexities?

Mr. Greg Lynn's love of robots

Website of Lynn's Robot studio

http://www.dieangewandte.at/archlynn/stories/storyReader$686

Scroll to the bottom and you'll find the research his Vienna studio did. PDF's of Robot culture and the Giant Robot studio.


video of the studio
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3674793775592565456&q=robot+studio+greg+lynn&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0