Bnieuws 49/01 - Back to school? (2015/16)

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Beyond the Swipe

METABODY Words Daphne Bakker

Images Nimish Biloria

Look up from the page and observe the people around you. How many of them are now staring at the brightly lit screen of their smartphone? We are all aware of how these devices are increasingly defining the way we communicate – not just with other humans, but with the technology itself. It commands us to swipe, press, push and speak, thus reducing our interactions to a highly reduced set of standardized and traceable gestures of interaction through interfaces. Yet it ignores the many subtle ways, shaped by our cultural background and individual personalities, through which we human beings express our thoughts and emotions. How can we propose alternative transdisciplinary communication platforms through the production of new kind of media that highlight the diversity of embodied expressions, bodies and contexts, foregrounding cultural diversity in a society transfixed by media technology?

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MetaBody, a five year EU Culture research project initiated in 2013, aims to develop new technologies, tools, and devices fostering novel modes of communication, which respect and utilize our diversity. Through collaboration with a multitude of experts, ranging from scientists to philosophers to performance artists from over sixteen countries, the project aims to integrate and showcase its research outputs in the form of an interactive multi-sensorial laboratory of perception and movement. The resulting pro-active architectural structure will travel all over Europe in the summer of 2017. And that’s where Hyperbody comes in. Hyperbody, the Chair led by Prof. Kas Oosterhuis and known for its experiments in Interactive Architecture, was a natural fit for this ambitious project from the very start. They were contacted early on by the initiators of MetaBody, after they had seen some of the studio’s work. “They were most intrigued by ‘Muscle Body’, an exhibition space which could expand and contract based on the

proximity of people inside the space,” explains Nimish Biloria, assistant professor at Hyperbody and the Project Leader of MetaBody. “Muscle Body was conceived as a living/breathing cocoon, but what MetaBody wanted was an amorphous entity that was impossible to comprehend as a singular form but rather consider it as multitude of ‘Formations in time’.” Biloria flew down to Madrid and together with the other collaborators fine-tuned the brief. The idea is to get away from this subject/object relationship which we establish every day with architecture. Biloria explains: “Architecture is always seen as an object to which you go and which provides certain services. But we want to change this entire perception. At Hyperbody we have been doing a lot with interactive architecture. Now we want to make the shift from Interactive to Proactive architecture. For MetaBody, this implies developing a pavilion structure, which not only reacts to gestures, movements and modalities of people, which it is interacting with, but a structure, which also


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