In collaboration with Megan Feehan, this workshop was an exploration with Lust of the ‘area where the virtual and physical merge, where new things can happen.’ The site was the CIT building and its immediate surroundings of the city block. We were asked to research – to do, in Jeroen’s words, ‘a very-very-quick-scan’ of the area to determine a point of entry. Ideas ?would develop from analyses of the scan.
We started with the idea that there is a lot of hidden information inherent ?to a building’s functioning. For example, the wireless networks that exist in the building that pop in and out of use are different depending on where one is located. We collected the names of each wireless network from each of the four corners, on each of the 6 floors. We also were interested in the elevator’s usage – is an elevator always running, where are the gaps in use? ?Where does it travel over a certain period of time? How could it be recorded and visually displayed in real-time?
This animation is a collection of what would be projected on the face ?of the building. The purpose was to show various functions of the building such as the elevator usage, shadows reacting to the extruded materials that make up the facade, the wi-fi networks that exist in the building which pop in and out of use depending on where one is located, the weather, the window shade position based on location of the sun, a computer animation affected by the physicalness of the building, the human activity of each floor and discipline, and lastly exposing the structural framework of the building.
Besides being visually interesting. This hints at the inner life of the building—that it is a constantly changing thing. It is a solid material but also an interactive design.
