03.10.2008
AN INTERVIEW WITH ERIK ADIGARD
AirXY: From Immaterial To Rematerial
The 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale Corderie dell’Arsenale
URL: http://www.airxy.org

New forms of architectural expression which combine digital technologies, sometimes called transmedia or multimedia, are the candidates for this year’s Venice Biennale: Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.  While these constructions typically transgress disciplinary boundaries, many established architectural firms, Diller Scofidio+Renfro, Zaha Hadid, MVRDV, as well as media designers, Erik Adigard M-A-D + Chris Salter, were commissioned to develop projects in this direction.

When architecture throughout history has been coupled with physical materiality, why would the Biennale’s director, Aaron Betsky, focus on experimental media?  For one, multimedia installations embody many architectural potentials, albeit at a discrete scale. Both media artists and architects must resolve perceptual transitions between spatial conditions, thresholds, and interfaces…and more importantly, media artists envision these transitions differently.  By observing the operative relations within immersive media, architects can begin to understand how change, responsiveness and flexibility can be designed into a system.

One installation, Air XYZ designed by Erik Adigard M-A-D + Chris Salter, explores these potentials through an ephemeral digital superimposition, championed earlier by Marcel Duchamp, which he termed the infrathin.    “A mass of accumulated space is projected onto a minimum transparency and thereby a huge amount of meaning is thus conferred upon an evanescent threshold.”    Here the notion of the infrathin is highly significant, and based on focus, perception and temporality. In Air XYZ, digital modes are perceptually embodied by the visitor and its immateriality simultaneously blurs interior and exterior, creating a dynamic interplay between the two.

What follows is an interview with the media designer, Erik Adigard, on the topic of architecture and immateriality. Adigard is, along with Patricia McShane, the founder of the multimedia design studio M-A-D.  Adigard’s work has appeared in Wired magazine, experimental websites such as LiveWired and Madscroll, the documentary “Webdreamer,” in addition to branding campaigns for IBM. As an award-winning designer, he has participated in numerous international media art exhibitions.

Thérèse Tierney / Erik Adigard
TT : A little about your background, first how would you describe what you do?
EA : I am a communication designer who has progressively shifted from print toward digital media. These days, because the ecology of media, languages, environments and cultures has becomes so complex, unstable and subjective I often think of myself as a perspective designer. That is when I am concerned with defining point of views through style, content, user interaction and connectivity between people, space and devices. In that way, this approach can be seen as an expended interpretation of “experience design”. PCs and internet have changed our point of views in the world way beyond the perspective we had with mass media. That is the context where I place my design practice.

TT:  How did you become interested in media design?
EA: As design director in the late 90’s for Wired Digital I was given full freedom and means to explore digital media. It is there, with a team of writers, programmers and engineers that I fully grasped how the mix of software and internet could lead to new perspectives on design, on communications and on culture itself.

TT:  When you design a website, what are your intentions?
EA: It depends what kind of website it is, whether I am dealing with time sensitive content such as news and/or rich media and/or databases and/or communities and/or e-commerce, etc, but basically I believe that:
1. The design process should be an accurate translation of existing factors into messages and functionalities.
2. Beyond resolving bottom line requirements, the project should aim toward some idealistic goal, whether formal or ethical. I have always tried to do so by including forecasting in my design thinking, so that my design can be a part of today’s momentum. Clearly this aspect of design has become incredibly challenging since our future is only predictable for being uncontrollable.

TT:  What is the tie-in to architecture?
EA: Architecture and digital screen are both inhabitable spaces of interaction, motion and responsiveness. Within the fixed frame of any screen there is a potential for multiple layers of dynamic functions, behaviors and expansive structures. We can conceive 2D or 3D open-ended and scalable communities, spectacles, games, market places or hideaways that exist in real time and simultaneously at the fingertips of users anywhere on the planet. No wonder so many web practitioners come from the field of architecture! And similarly, when they conceive interfaces, graphic designers routinely refer to architectural modalities.

TT: You mentioned that the value sets of code can conflict with user experience principles. Within your design process, there are elements of analysis, synthesis and evaluation, and that a kind of cycling occurs between synthesis and evaluation, what one might call an iterative relationship between programming and user-testing in order to refine the site further.  Could you elaborate on this process?
EA: The relationship between coding and user experience is similar to that of structural engineering and visitors in a building. So when you design a form or a user experience you always have to consider how it needs to be realized. With interface design, there are issues such as costs, scalability, security and many others that are also found in architecture. The advantage of digital design is that it is very fluid and can in theory easily be modified, so yes whenever possible I try to design through an iterative process so we can see how users and interface respond to each other. In this process, the programming loosely coexists with research, user testing, GUI, content development, information architecture and other aspects of whatever is being designed.

TT: This year, you are presenting at the Venice Biennale, curated by former SFMOMA Aaron Betsky’s “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building,” could you describe your installation, “AirXY: FROM IMMATERIAL TO REMATERIAL” and why you created it?
EA: My answer to Aaron’s call is a claim that beyond the built, there is “the screen” and even “the beyond the screen.” The context of our installation being an architecture exhibit, my intent with Chris Salter was to turn screens into walls that reconfigure the Corderie spatiality, while also being digital interfaces that chart and restructure the physical space around—in that sense, the screen becomes signifier and signified.
- The intent of AirXY is to explore notions shared by technology, aesthetics and ethics while relating them to our responsibilities in the physical world. Practically, AirXY is a large real time media screen that displays a giant clock running on a XY axis, as well as other components such as panning screen interfaces and passing visitors that are captured on overhead cameras. That screen is in a convex fold and therefore it contains an inner space filled with fog through which a beam of light draws its own structures. Together, theses 2D and 3D spaces reflect on the sensory experiences of the two worlds we inhabit, one being physical and the other digital. Together they become a relational ecology of minds, societies and environment.

TT:  What software tools were used?
EA: Other than photoshop, all components of AirXY are built using open-source technologies. The AirXY application is written in C++ using the openFrameworks library. The video processing is done using OpenCV and the FreeFrame 1.5 video plugin architecture, with custom-built host and plugins. Rendering is done in traditional OpenGL and using GLSL shaders. The remote controller is written in Java using the Processing framework and the controlP5 and oscP5 libraries.

TT: Why did you use these tools?
EA: It would have been much easier to use Flash but we were concerned it couldn’t handle the massive computation needed when there is a lot of passing visitors.

TT:  Why do you choose to work with new media/software?
EA: more than any physical material, these are the media of our times and as such they help to reflect the world we live in. historically, the most relevant works have always been created with contemporary media, techniques and languages.

TT:  Earlier, you had mentioned your concerns about Second Life, could you please reiterate them?
EA: Last year I made an installation in Second Life and found it to be ill resolved. At the time, Linden Labs seemed like a sloppy company with low professional standards and an ill resolved product. I still have faith in Second Life and will attempt another installation in the next few months. I strongly believe in the potential of 3D worlds as spaces for creative explorations whether for the conception of new aesthetics or new human relationships. And of course there are tremendous opportunities for commerce.

TT: In the essay, “mobilism >> 10 thoughts on the desktop” you propose that the desktop has evolved to become the home. I find the idea fascinating; what would you say then about cellphone websites/applications such as “twitter”?
EA: Yes, the screen has definitely become an inhabitable space which itself contains subspaces in the form of interfaces. But “screen” also means the network of 6 billion+ screens which is the atmosphere we are referring to with AirXY. The iPhone is at once vehicle and window in this eco-system and Twitter is one of the devices and channels that are “wiring” and populating the “screenverse.”

The 11th Architecture Biennale is curated by Aaron Betsky and organised by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta from September 14th to November 23rd 2008.