fields

Digital Spaces Highlights

This years Digital Spaces second year elective kicked up some interesting work. First time that the module had ran, and we’re still learning how to explore digital culture through architectural practice that doesn’t end up in renders or banal 3d models…

Marcus

The simple intervention of cementing a mobile phone into a wall in Edinburgh reminded us of how can architecture have agency, if the phone alerts a passer by to a message, who are they talking to if they reply? The wall?

A Talking Point from Marcus Rothnie on Vimeo.

Kathryn

Kathryn’s remedy for home sickness in her 1st year was to keep a Skype conversation on all day with her parents. She described the resulting hyper/cyber space as a Cybrid (see Peter Anders). The video depicts her laser cut model upon which is projected elements of conversation that are shared between Kathryn’s room in Edinburgh, and her parents lounge in Leicester.

Mo

This was fun. In an exploration of the power of human image recognition and tracking, Mo used an XBox Kinnect to track a flat members activity in the kitchen and associate it with the navigation of car in a racing game. Whilst the flat mate has no idea what is going on, you can see how hard the pc is working to sustain gameplay.

Atanaska

Atanaska became interested in sensibilities of analogue / digital representations of streets. Displaying one as a screen recording of a fly-thru of an Edinburgh street using Google Street View, the other a Super 8 movie from the same place. Extraordinary how hard it was to recover the film technology, processing and projection.

Fatemah

Fatemah wanted to explore connections to the mobile network as a topological map. The contours give clues to the best connections across the city, and if you know the area you should be able to spot areas such Princess Street and the Meadows just by the space between the masts that generate the contour lines.

Download the map here

Justine

Justine spent a long time thinking of ways to explore her relationship with her friends via social networks. She discovered that her mobile had retained over 3000 outgoing SMS messages. Quick thinking on her part led her to publishing all of the messages in chronological order in the form of a book. Printed as though it was a novel, the book was legible and fascinating in its inter woven stories – stories that never revealed their source since the reader only ever had the outgoing message. A clever decision that involved the reader as protagonist.

Sigurd

Sigurd was the nearest we had to a programmer! Talented and prepared to persevere he mined location data across his friends on Facebook to develop ‘maps’ of connections and locations. Animated in their final form, the representations described our sense of place as a complex social construct.