Supernormal workshop (in)visible 2

(in)VISIBLE CARLA POSTORINO NADIA CATERINA RAVIOLA SADAF KHALILZARE SHREE SAKTHI THIYAGARAJAN YANGYANG PENG

SUPERNORMAL Tutor: Alicia Velรกzquez Springweek - LUCA School Of Arts 21-24.03.2016 Group: (in)VISIBLE

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez

CONCEPT

Our main goal was to explore the relationship between electronic devices and people. In this case, within the context of our school and the nature of our study-architecture. Our first task was to understand the role, dependency, inherent characteristics, behavioural changes between people and their gadgets.

We began by asking ourselves, are we really free? We presume we are free to do as we please, yet we spend 8-14 hours a day on a average sitting in front of a screen. Does the screen control us? But, isn’t the screen dependent on electricity? The electricity that it gets via power cables.

This was the starting point for our action.

Our inspiration came from the extension cables that were a plenty in our faculty. We started to talk about how we forget to eat or talk to people because we are too busy working or socialising via the internet.

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia VelĂĄzquez

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez

PROCESS

Our discussions revolved around how we could make visible our invisible connections to our electronic devices/gadgets.

Initially we also wanted to explore social interaction between people and how apps/social media has made us neglect communication on a personal/face-to-face basis. On a screen we pretend to be certain person or portray a certain emotion. In reality though it’s only an act and our true emotions or feelings are never conveyed. People now prefer to discuss or talk via messaging rather than having a real life conversation. Confronting a person in reality can bring out true emotions and avoiding it is what we are doing by engaging in text based conversations.

We were in a way trying to depict two closely related themes, one was social interaction and the other was our dependence on our devices/gadgets. We had to find a way to try to localise the theme to fit our faculty and our activities within the school. We had two ideas to realise the project. The first was to physically materialise the disturbances that social media has in our day to day activities in the form of message boxes actually hitting someone. The second was to give life to the power cables and let them entwine on the person to simulate the control and/or dependence we have to our gadgets.

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia VelĂĄzquez

ACTION

We sequenced a series of acts as our performance in the form of a short video. The acts were sequenced to simulate a day at our university. Precisely, the day before the design studio. Our main idea was to use the power cables as a material element, this element was conceived as a living being and would attach onto our actress as and when she interacted with electronic devices. We had three main scenes, the first being arrival to the university and going to a classroom to work. The second was a lunch break scene staged at the cafeteria. The third scene was late in the evening when our actress is engulfed in cables and becomes invisible. The closing scene is her engulfed computer while the cables portray the shape of her.

Our team member Sadaf was our main character, she played herself, a master student of architecture at KU Leuven. We documented her day in the faculty and how she interacted with her gadgets

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez

REFLECTION & CONCLUSION

We as individuals think that we are free but actually we are not, we as architects experience this invisible limitation every day. We experience it more and more by pointing out the issue in this exercise, we are wrapped up by electronic devices, cables are everywhere, controlling us in all daily tasks, limiting us; They are our daily companions which we convey our ideas through. Our social life is controlled by all electronic devices(laptops,cellphones,etc) everybody is communicating through cables, we live a virtual life and are controlled by devices and gadgets and we don’t notice it even .

It is obvious that electronic gadgets are everywhere in our lives but we as designers should at least think about the spaces that we are using these gadgets in, to make changes to them or create spaces that people can communicate face to face instead of communicating through gadgets.

Put yourself in the shoes of the device, there is someone who is with me all the time, uses me, carries me, cleans me, I am his/her best friend, we are talking to her/his friends, we are together all the time, I have to take care of him/her all the time as well.

In this working process we tackle with this invisible controlli ng of our lives through Electronic devices and gadgets. We want to make it more visible some times by visualizing the actual life and sometimes by exaggerating it this will make us noticed that how much we are controlled by this device.

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia VelĂĄzquez

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SUPERNORMAL Alicia Velรกzquez