12KUBE

To whom it may concern,

I am currently involved in the development of a project for an art-festival-rave-exhibition planned for an undisclosed point of time this future. The working title is 12KUBE, and the skinny is basically a setup for 12 separate exhibition spaces for 12 invited artists, all housed in a large venue yet to be defined.

In this process I'm looking into developing a scheme that is universal, site-unspecific, and incorporate ideas from our collective interest in emergent behaviour, game theory and to some extent perhaps situationism applied in architecture. The overall aim is primarily to investigate a spatial organization detached from traditional functionalist paradigms, with aims to establish an architecture that is inhabited or occupied rather than executed as part of program, meaning an effort to fertilize natural bottom-up emergant behavioural patterns.

This is of course a paradox, and this is where any discussion of such ideas begins. How to design a system of non-design? And isn't any large gathering of individuals inherently subject to emergent behaviour?

What follows is a series of initial sketches, outlining the basic premise.

For those not familiar with Conway's Game Of Life, here is some further reading hypertext:

http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson6.html

http://www.leda-tutorial.org/en/official/ch02s02s02.html

and a playable java-version

What I find interesting in this approach is the potential of colliding organizational systems, the overall configuration of the space is generated by a simple set of rules. The collision as such comes into effect when human agents operate in the negative, left-over/in-between-space the first system dictates, and their own operational agendas as participants.

The interior of the cubes themselves will of course also play a large part, and attract or detract attention in relation with their content, and I assume various architectural or other attributes will become relevant, in particular use of light, sound, heat. I would propose to keep the main hall largely darkened, with potential to temporarily illuminate sections of the space to stage ephemeral, pop-up performance/eventspaces that in theory could occur at any place or at any time within the darkened space. These events could be utilized as catalysts to temporarily activate unpopular parts of the playing field effectively "breaking the fourth wall" by making the participants momentarily self-aware. To further underline the potentials of the concept, I would also propose eventual seating arrangements to be mobile, lightweight and singular, this importance made evident in this film (@20:20), which I also highly recommend watching in full.

There are different approaches to the kind of games Conway's "Game of Life" represents, if not only in terms of geometric similarities. A familiar example is the simple game of tic-tac-toe, as mentioned in the leda tutorial. Another example to some extent, the windows classic minesweeper. Another more prolific, the japanese game GO.

Below is a set of investigations I did during todays lecture on modern day virtue-ethics. Incidentally, the flipside provided me with the alternative tic-tac-toe approach, produced some months earlier at a similar event.

The rules I experimented with included the following: Each cube may create clusters, but no larger than three in size. Clusters may join orthogonally or diagonally, with a maximum length of two cubes orthogonally, and three diagonally. Spacing between clusters are related to their size, a cluster of two may not be in closer proximity to another cluster than two cubes, singles may be positioned within a single cube's distance. This complicated exercise in parametric design was performed using a supercomputer.

The alternative tic-tac-toe exercise followed standard championship rules. X vs O, five in a row wins and ends the game.

That is all for now. Any feedback is appreciated. The project is a collaboration with and the brain-child of Michael Hare.