Corpora Blog: Can you hightlight some inspirations sources for Corpora project? Which projects inspired you, which books, movies, theoretical texts had the most influence on the current stage of Corpora?

Max Rheiner: First of all, I was always very interested on sci-fi books, and there are pretty good sci-fi writers around, and for this project, I was really involved myself with Vernor Vinge, he writes about singularity, and also he writes about how technology changes society, and how this technology influences a certain kind of society, and in this case, I was very interested that he built up these sensor systems.

He made a book about how these sensor systems, these mash networks could  actually influence an another kind of spices in a planet.And this was very interesting for me, as he break up the border of what we call an entity: how that would be if different species would merge into a single being? We could say we are different persons each other, we have feelings, we have separate bodies, feet, arms etc., but is it possible to see each other as one, single entity? But could this also be true for a flock or a crowd? – this was quite interesting for me.
I also like the idea of this mash network to act as a nerve system of a bigger being, but still have these small entities what it is made of, which can act independently.
I was also influenced by his new book, the Rainbow’s End, in which the world it totally merged into a augmented reality, actually there is no bordering between, actually everything what you see is somehow one layer of reality.

You can sit here in a park, and besides you , could be hundreds of other people, but the maybe in a different world, in Tokyo, anywhere, but they do not care, and that’s also  why I like the augmented reality part of Corpora,because you see something which is not there, but you can see it, projected back to the real space again. And it is not like 3D graphics, not just an image itself, but also the other fact that the date comes from the real area, which you can also see. This kind of feedback loop was also interesting.

Sota Ichikawa: The Corpora was based on the Cellular Automaton and the Game of Life from John Conway, so I can say maybe I was inspired by the novels of Greg Egan, for example the Permutation City: it is about the issue of combing our reality with the computer simulated world and also biotechnology. In these books, one of the main question is, if how much computing capacity is needed for a person to represent themselves in a computer simulated world as real as possible.

Ákos Maróy: For a long time, I have been interested in self organizing systems, and this is what my PHD was about as well, and even before that I was interested in this area. I was very interested about the project, when I first spoke with Sota, because I immediately saw the opportunity to create something which has a self organizational aspect. I would not highlight any specific piece of background literature, the subject of cellular automaton and similar self organizing systems are already widely covered. But there is not much of research results on ‘emergence’ or gaining new consciousness in these systems, and somehow I lack the scientific interest for this new way to approach to these systems.
I find this area very interesting, and I think and even in biology, these are open issues. For example, it is still an open question, if how is a body forming, how does it evolves – this is also a distributed technology. So basically how your limbs are formed, or any of your organs, is not centrally governed, but it is a distributed process.
Actually this is the research area of Bea Oborny, who wrote a text for our Catalog.
I am interested in these systems, and especially on where the element of complexity enters them – that’s what my PHD is about: if you start to build a system with simple components, and some form of complexity enters the system, and you can measure the complexity in some way, and then you can highlight, what it that you have to add to the simple component so that the complexity level rises. Where it this border located, what is the engine for this change, for this new level of complexity to evolve. So, I have found similar traits in Corpora, and theoretically speaking, this was my core interest in the project.

Kaoru Kobata: I would add what an element what is covered in the Corpora in Si(gh)te Concept Book I: The basic way is thinking on the notation system of Corpora, which has now been thirteen years for now, developed form a single Super-Eye notation point. But maybe Sota can give a better explanation on this:

Sota Ichikawa: The idea for the Super Eye came, when I was a student of architecture. There was a competition by that time, the Foreign Office Architects Farshid Moussavi, Alejandro Zaera-Polo designed the Yokohma International Port Terminal,

Yokohma International Port Terminal, Image copyright: http://flickr.com/photos/wivern/27886127/

And I was in the competition team, and when I saw the first schemes, I have realized that the structure is in fact a carpet, a totally manipulated 3D carpet, and it solves its function very well.
And then I saw these drawings, – and maybe it is a little bit difficult to understand, but there were no walls or roofs, everything is mixed, – I immedietly felt it is like a carpet. So I thought that this space does not fit the usual notation system, and maybe if we use some other ‘language’, we might get a new concept of space from it.

Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Burroughs / copyright (boingboing.net citing an ebay ad)

And I was also very addicted to read the novels of William Burroughs, actually it is a bit difficult to read it, anyway: one of his story which is about a sect of Islam assassins: the Hashshashin, these highly professional killers are using a special notation system for the space, only usable to them, sort of a different system or language.
I was inspired by these protocol systems, which act as a different language for the space and so came the idea for the Super Eye, which is a basic element of the Corpora.

(book covers copyright owned by their creators, and the images are only being used in the article for informational and educational purposes.)

Corpora in Si(gh)te book I is a documentation and concept book for the previous exhibition of the project Corpora in Si(gh)te, held between October 2007 and January 2008 at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). The book includes explanation drawings, comments and concept texts by the members of doubleNegatives Architecture (the authors of the project) and texts by curators.

The book is available to download from our site under in PDF under  CC-nc-by-sa license, and the texts of the  second volume, Corpora in Si(gh)te book II is being published  under the Venice Catalogue entry, on a weekly basis.

What can architecture learn from the cities hollowed out from the Cappadocia cliffs, from a wasp’s nest, or even from the structure of an anthill? The architectural project Corpora in Si(gh)te exhibited in the Hungarian Pavilion of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia explores the possibilities of design based on unique notation systems and local time based informations.

A number of sensors are set up forming a mesh network throughout the area surrounding the Hungarian Pavilion in order to collect and distribute real-time environmental information such as temperature, brightness, humidity, wind direction and sound. The data collected from these sources are processed by a software and translated into nodes reflecting the sensor network. These nodes are the seeds for the virtual architecture of Corpora representing a cellular, distributed network of nodes that are reacting through real-time processing, growing and subsiding like an organism. Each node makes local decisions independently of a central architect. The nodes inadvertently give rise to architectural structures in the Giardini Park. This “information architecture” of nodes has its own spatial perception to make itself transform into various forms by relying on the doubleNegatives Architecture’s super-eye concept. The fluid character of this architecture occurs as a living form. Visitors can observe this process by Augmented Reality Technology, located in various parts of Giardini Park.

The doubleNegatives Architecture team, which consists of Japanese, Swiss and Hungarian artists, works at the frontier of architecture and media art. The corpora main members are, Ákos Maróy, Max Rheiner, Kaoru Kobata and Sota Ichikawa – who founded the group in 1998.

Through this first European presentation of Corpora – as adapted for the Hungarian Pavilion – they point to the transformation of traditional architectural thinking. We are witnessing the converging movement of architecture, design and information technology. We have taken a step in the direction of creating buildings, which “converse” with their environment in an interactive manner, follow the changes in human demands and behave organically. In the process, the secularised division of tasks and labour gives way to a holistic perspective that regards the so-called “digital” space as natural and a part of the environment.

the curator and the corpora team

corpora.hu

corpora.doublenegatives.jp

corpora.ycam.jp

“What can architecture learn from the cities hollowed out from the
Cappadocia cliffs, from a wasp’s nest, or even from the structure of
an anthill? The project Corpora in Si(gh)te of the team
doubleNegatives Architecture, born of a Japanese-Swiss-Hungarian
collaboration, follows the model of structures originated without the
guidance of a designer-engineer, organized from the bottom up,
employing generative architectural technique.

The sensors placed in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and in the Giardini
continuously process events occurring in the space, evaluate them, and
then decide themselves in what manner the virtual structure should be
constructed, the perpetually changing architecture of Corpora. The
organic edifice produced by an algorithm as a cellular automaton lives
in symbiosis with the Secession pavilion designed by Géza Maróti. The
real image transmitted by video cameras and the projected structure
generated in the exhibition space appears on projectors and monitors,
where the audience can also manipulate the view. Corpora in Si(gh)te
is an experiment investigating how architecture and the differentiated
praxis of construction in the age of digital technologies can be newly
recombined. The architect can once again attain a direct connection to
the transparent processes of construction and production by way of the
new design and construction technologies. The Corpora project regards
the building as a living organism, which, accommodating to the demands
of users and the environment, is capable of changing. The head curator
of the 11th Venice Architectural Biennial, Aaron Betsky, also prompts
the architects of the present era towards this end with his announced
concept entitled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, to which the
Hungarian Pavilion reacts with the presentation of the Corpora in
Si(gh)te project.”

A small text as an example of easy theoretical background materials, this time on the Place of Emperor Diocletian and William Gibson’s mind.

The Place and the Bridge

Split is a city in Croatia, with two hundred thousand inhabitants, lying on the sunny shores of the Adriatic Sea, not far from the actual site of the 11^th Architectural Exhibition. Spalato, as Split was known in the times of the Ancient Roman Empire, was the personal retreat and castle of Emperor Diocletian from 284 to 305 AD, and until the last few hundred years, it remained more or less architecturally hegemonic: a new city was formed ‘inside’ the old palace building. Much like a fallen carcass, which host a large number of creatures who feed upon the deceased entity’s resources, the new inhabitants of Split, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the disappearance of the ruling Roman society, started to live inside the palace, turning the once glorious halls of the emperor into markets and the colossal bedrooms into apartments for entire families.

(the Royal Palace of Spalato)

(houses among the pillars of the old Palace in Split downtown, from Wikimedia)

The palace turned to be a city, not by architectural decision, but the mere need of its inhabitants, who found the monumental building adequate for their needs, and adjusted it slightly to use it as a new place of habitation.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco come to the same fate, yet not on the pages of history, but in the novels of the science-fiction writer William Gibson, in his books, namely the Bridge Trilogy. After a massive earthquake, which damaged the structure of this landmark of the South Californian city, the site become a derelict ruin, much same as the Imperial Palace in Split. As more and more people set up their temporary business or living space around, or in the bridge, it started to be a foundation of a new city inside the city. This shantytown of the bridge plays an important role in the novel Virtual Light, and its legacy surfaces in the Idoru and All Tomorrow parties – it becomes the ultimate site for those who seek a new community, shelter or maybe need a space to hide.

(Oakland Bay bridge, copyright by: the_girl via Wikimedia)

In both cases, an already standing building was augmented, enhanced by its inhabitants, but without any architectural presumption. They just happened to gather around an already given structure, modified it according to their needs, in order to build up a new living structure. These structures become of bases on a new, generative projects, which were fueled by the mere needs of people inhabiting the area.

Corpora might do the same with the Hungarian Pavilion of the 11^th Architecture Exhibition, use the architecture of the original structure to build up something new, something which fits the needs of the new inhabitants as well, since this evolving comes with the sheer usage of any space, in which we want to feel comfortable. What makes a large difference is the speed how Corpora’s sensor system and software is modifying the space around it – as its information network is much faster then any previous one.

At  the Pixel Gallery – Budapest where Gusztav Hamos’ videos are exhibited now, we spoke about the possibilities to show Corpora project in Berlin.

Here are photos

According to Aaron Betsky –for six years director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam, one of the most prestigious museums and architecture centres in the world, and from last year Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum– the 11th Architecture Biennale, entitled Out There. Architecture Beyond Building, “points out what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building.
Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them. This is architecture. More generally, architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment. In this world it is not enough to keep the rain out, create room for office cubicles, or fit into a context that either changes continually or becomes artificially frozen. In fact, buildings are not enough. They are the tombs of architecture, the residue of the desire to make another world, a better world, and a world open to possibilities beyond the everyday.

In a concrete sense, architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world. That could mean producing homes, offices or other places where we live, work, gather or recreate. However, the production of such buildings has become so defined by codes –financial codes, building codes, life and safety codes, computer codes, codes of appearance and behavior—that architecture has very little to do with the way they finally appear.
In isolated situations, such as when a rich person wants a house or a museum wants a cultural artifact, we can find instances of architecture that sensually and sensibly shapes our environment in such a way that it allows us know where we are.

At the same time, fabulous spaces are possible. We can see them in film and in art, where visions of other places unfold in front of our eyes. We can inhabit them in the highly defined spaces that cocoon around us, whether they are the private interior or in hotel rooms, or in the clubs, the restaurants and the boutiques that have become our gathering spaces. We can watch them grow around us in the carefully planned landscapes that have become our last true public spaces.
These images and spaces are worth looking at not just because they are beautiful, but because we are confronting design challenges for which buildings are not enough. How are we going to figure out how to do sprawl right, for instance? If our cities are bleeding out into concatenations of human dwellings that reach across the landscape without any concern for either the environment or social coherence, how can we create an architecture that uses the landscape wisely, frames a relationship to that world and to each other, allows us to be at home and connects us to a larger social, economic and physical fabric? How can we be at home at all in a world in which the continual movement of goods, people and information continually erodes all sense of permanence from any place? How can we construct a physical order that can become a stage on which we can live our lives in concert with others if the constructions that allow us live and play our roles are increasingly invisible results of communications and computer technologies?

Maybe we need to see architecture first of all as way of figuring out what we need to build -and what to unbuild. How can we make spaces that make sense and are sensual? Can we construct literal stages or notional moments of coherence? Can we reveal, appropriate and domesticate those forces, usually of a technological nature, that control our daily lives in such a way that we can feel at home in our modern world?
To do this, perhaps what we need is slow space -not stopped space, not utopia, but also not business usual. We need some icons and some enigmas to make us wonder. We need experiments, a few provisional structures, a few sketches or some maps of how we can move beyond the constructions and constrictions of building to create an architecture that does not solve problems, but poses, frames and articulates them. We need an architecture that questions reality.

This is the challenge the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale takes up. It seeks to collect and encourage experimentation in architecture. Such experimentation can take the form of momentary constructions, visions of other worlds, or the building blocks of a better world. This Biennale does not want to present buildings that are already in existence and can be enjoyed in real life. It does not want to propose abstract solutions to social problems, but wants to see if architecture, by experimenting in and on the real world, can offer some concrete forms or seductive images. The use of new technologies is certainly something to consider in such experimentation, but so are the techniques developed outside of what we usually think of as the world of architecture, such as art, interior design, film, landscape architecture and performance. In a concrete sense, the use of collage and assemblage, of re-use and reconstruction, of unbuilding and deformation, of ephemeral form and utopian or dystopian imagery, and the posing of the ugly, the unformed and the undecided or blurred are all possibilities. In reality, there is a secret history of architecture separate from the progression of styles and the vagaries of technological perfection that has used such forces to produce an other architecture, and it is in this tradition that the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale places itself”.

Out There: Architecture Beyond Building will present, in the Venice Arsenale, large-scale site specific installations that will ask the question how we can be at home in the modern world. There it will offer an alternative to urban planning in viral architecture . It will present manifestos for an architecture beyond building. It will show visions that might become the building blocks for such an architecture. It will finally bring us back to Eden. Participants will include Diller Scofidio+Renfro, UN Studio, Massimiliano Fuksas, Nigel Coates, Erik Adigard, Work Architecture, Droog Design, Philippe Rahm and Kathryn Gustafson, as well as architects who will create viral forms.
In the Padiglione Italia, a survey of experimental architecture will show the work firms from around the world who are engaged in such work. This survey will be anchored by small monographic shows on firms whose work has been based on such experimentation: Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Morphosis, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au. A presentation of experiments one can find on the World Wide Web and beyond will further enhance this collection of forms and images.

The 11th Venice Architecture Biennale is being assembled by Aaron Betsky with the help of an international curatorial team consisting of Francesco Delogu, Emiliano Gandolfi, Casey Jones, Reed Kroloff, Marcin Szczelina and Saskia van Stein. The Amsterdam firm of Thonik will work with him to design the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale’s identity and presentations.

The 11th International Architecture Exhibition will also present numerous National Participations with exhibitions inside the Pavilions at Giardini and through the historic centre in Venice.
Collateral Events organised by cultural institutions from all over the world will also be part of the exhibition, setting up their shows in Venice.

The catalogue of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition will be published by Marsilio.

The official website is www.labiennale.org

Corpora in Si(gh)te – Generative Architecture in Public Space

Project Leader: Gyula Július

The winning project is the work of international creative group doubleNegatives Architecture, presented as lead by curator Gyula Július at the Hungarian Pavilion in Venice.

The work under realisation through the collaboration of Japanese, Hungarian and Swiss artists examines the bottom-up organisation of cellular systems, inspired by natural processes, on the boundary of architecture operating under traditional planning direction. The project has been prepared for the pavilion itself, the model springing from this on the basis of information taken from the direct environment, continually reacting to it and growing in an evolutionary system, making its decisions in accordance with it.

The architectural structure representing the primary part of the exhibition exists in symbiosis with the Art Nouveau pavilion, comprehending it within its system and reinterpreting its spaces, taking these as its point of departure in building into it the stimuli of the environment as well as those generated by the visitors. With the aid of the techniques of representation, the physical space expands into a complex, poetic, experiential system, in which the intervention of the viewer determines viewpoint and orientation, as well as the development of the structure. The installation creates a possibility for the investigation of correlations between historical architecture and its contemporary approaches, and for the exploration of new domains of interpretation.

The strength of the project lies in the fact that it has been realised as the result of a productive collaboration between the representatives of a variety of disciplines, in which the common work of the creators and the curator with his wide range of experience anticipates the further enrichment of the continually developing project. The poetic employment of technology emphasises the human factor – the importance of individual participation – alongside invention in the process of planning, providing a new role for both the architect and the user. Nevertheless, locality and the thinking that proceeds from it constitutes an integral part of the installation that voices the universal vocabulary of architecture.

The jury has proposed the Corpora project for the Hungarian Pavilion of the 11th Venice Architectural Biennial due to its rich stratification, potentials for development and innovative approach. We suggest that in the further development of the work, practical application, connection with the cultural and professional, theoretical context, further potentials for implementation and a particular weight on communication be incorporated.