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Cybrid
Reknown for
its integration of Arts, Science and Technology, the STAR department
at the University of Plymouth have made the most of a new Fielden
Clegg Bradley building. By capturing its social, communications
and environmental data the team are using a new form of 'software
for buildings', that allows them to turn data into images, animations
and experiences to allow inhabitants to 'see' what the building
is doing.
www.i-dat.org/projects/cybrid.html
by Chris
Speed. cspeed@plymouth.ac.uk
Plymouth,
as with so many of Britain’s regional centres it is currently
undergoing a cultural makeover as part of attempts to refocus
the city as a happening, future oriented place to come, live and
do business in. Inevitably much of this is focused on the incipient
new media activity, which bubbles just under the surface of the
city’s cultural activity. And much, perhaps inevitably derives
from one of the hubs of that activity, the University of Plymouth’s
School of Computing.
Hidden in its warren of departmental activities, is STAR, otherwise
known in the curriculum brochures as the Science, Technology and
Arts Research group. STAR’s group of computer science and
interactive media researchers have for the last two years run
an interesting annual exhibition, Without Walls. This has explored
the relation between only too existent physical and the emergent
digital architecture fields, attempting to nurture a dialogue
between the two. In the last two years the University commissioned
a series of three new buildings to re-house various expanded departments
on the University’s increasingly cramped Portland Square
site. The square, such as it is, fronts onto a main road which
leads between Plymouth’s concrete city centre and one of
its immediate inner city suburbs beginning only yards further
up the hill. If one wanted to draw the attention of the many passers-by
these buildings would be a good opportunity. STAR, who have for
a number of years been researching the prospective futuristic
interfaces between buildings, their users and the passing public
saw their chance. As the building plans developed they developed
Cybrid, a groundbreaking synergy between the built environment
and a whole new range of uses in the building for new media, particularly
sensor, tracking and particularly an innovative take on how Building
Maintenance Systems technology, might be used for artistic, indeed
Information art ends.
The
project centres upon one of these three new University of Plymouth
buildings, giant steel and glass box behemoths, characteristic
of the many contemporary large scale buildings that are too complex
to understand just by looking at them. Defined by its social function
for a huge variety of different people, wired completely to allow
itself to control its own environmental conditions, and providing
a digital and actual space for people to work in, the building
can be ‘alive’ and present in many different ways.
However like most digital systems, these dynamics which make the
architecture so versatile and meaningful for so many different
people are hidden, and the building will continue to look same
day in and day out.
Portland
Square Building at the University of Plymouth, Designed by Fielden,
Clegg, Bradley architects.
Cybrid
was thus born out of the desire to explore and illustrate the
complexity that defines such a contemporary building. By tapping
into the data networks that are hidden throughout the building,
the Cybrid becomes a resource for scientists, engineers, researchers
and artists to begin representing some of the hidden activity
that defines the buildings use. From watching the movement of
people, to tracking their use of the internet and even monitoring
the environmental conditions of the building, new representations
of this activity will emerge, perhaps as sound through speakers,
as images through data projections or as a stream of information
to a website, Cybrid is intended to visualise the many images
that one building can be known as, but is traditionally understood
as one.
The
actual building where STAR’s experiment is being hatched,
is designed by the well-respected environmental architectural
practice, Fielden Clegg Bradley. The three office blocks are connected
by an open corridor linking three atria to form a fluid, and multi
level environment that is well lit, and well designed. The building
is host to a number of ‘cutting edge’ schools and
departments, most notably the Peninsula Medical School, which
works from an interdisciplinary medicine teaching philosophy embracing
many other departments activities; neuroscience, engineering,
and interactive media. If it is simple enough to ‘see’
the building from the outside and begin to find a relationship
with it through a staff or student disposition; it doesn’t
mean that it is easy to get your head around the nature of building
that serves so many different people in so many different ways.
In
dealing with the complexity of ‘reading’ such a building
you need to begin understanding what else constitutes the building
other than the steel and glass that holds it up. STAR as well
as another group from the Centre for Neural and Adaptive Systems
were interested in this very question, and set about determining
what the building was. They quickly revealed a host of services
that were not only just beneath the surface of the plaster, but
that are also clearly the sort of processes that makes the building
actually useful and habitable to its users. In wanting to develop
alternative understandings for the building, the STAR team has
set out to use these discreet and ubiquitous technologies to reveal
more about what the building was doing. They realised that by
taking the data directly from its source in the building, such
as the Building Management System, it could be turned into information
that would reveal an alternative interpretation of what the building
looked like. The guiding principle idea behind wanting to model
the systems of this building was to enhance our relationship with
it, to make more use of its job as host for our activities and
social interactions. Otherwise the building will remain dumb,
simply sheltering us from the rain.
Whilst
the building housing Cybrid was going up, STAR have been negotiating
the technical frameworks so as to source the data from which new
software can generate these new representations of the building
and its activities. So the building management system (BMS), the
very system that keeps the building breathing, monitors and manages
its temperature, its use of water and lighting conditions can
all be the material palette for an interested Information artist.
In fact the BMS as a collection of data, offers a far more accurate
idea of what the building looks like, offering a window on its
alternating lighting, heating and water use during the course
of each twenty four hours. Since Cybrid is wired to the computer
network, STAR will be able to look at information regarding the
nature of network traffic, and anticipate monitoring its use,
possibly where people are going on the web, and how the networks
bandwidth is affected. There are also video and other vsion systems
located close to the ceilings in the buildings main circulation
spaces, allowing further monitoring of the movement of people.
Working with the Neural and Adaptive research group, STAR hope
to use software techniques, building data pictures about the passage
and density of people within the real spaces. There will also
be microphones to sample and record audio from the building and
its inhabitants, which can in turn be played back through the
many speakers located throughout the spaces. Simple sensing devices
located in the top of the lift shafts, will reveal the nature
of the elevators traffic, where it goes, how often, and how quickly.
This will add to the thorough picture of movement through the
building.
The
Cybrid Waterfall that changes its size and volume based on the
amount of water the building is using.
All
these data resources will be pooled in the Core of the Cybrid,
which will form the basis of a multi-layered source of data and
information, which can be transformed into either in-house projects
or external commissions. STAR envisage their in-house projects
will include audio based projects, exploiting sound technologies
to allow dynamic data passed to the Core to be represented through
a range of sonic/audio broadcast technologies; Visual, spatial
or conceptual projects - such as a series of installation projects
being envisaged that tap the Core for data that can transform
information to enable specific visual, telematic or physical manifestations
of data. Lastly the plan is that the schools research work on
robotics and intelligent systems research is to be extended. Externally,
Cybrid is to be a space for commissions. There is a wide range
of potential artists and researchers to involve in translating
Core data so Cybrid presents itself as an extraordinary canvas
for very wide range of media artists involved across the range
of sound, software, image, time based media and engineering. All
of whom may have entirely different conceptions of what the building
is, and are able to sift, gather and manipulate the data to develop
new and unusual models for digital arts practice.
One
architect and writer who is acutely aware of the transformation
that buildings are undergoing in a digital age is Peter Anders.
Anders, part of the STAR team and author of ‘Envisioning
Cyberspace’ presents a useful theoretical model for understanding
the increasingly flexible model of a building that we need to
understand as we begin interacting with buildings beyond that
of simply opening doors and turning lights on. It was Anders who
coined the Cybrid phrase, which as he writes is “a link
on the continuum between concrete objects and abstract data. The
line that separates data from objects represents a continuum rather
than a division. Today there are situations where data and concrete
objects work together to create new spatial entities, herein called
“cybrids.” A cybrid is a hybrid of physical and electronic
spaces.” (Anders, 2001). In explaining a Cybrid further
Anders reminds us of our interactions with systems such as searching
a buildings library of books. In doing so we are negotiating with
two spaces; one a computer database, and two the collection of
books on the shelves in a series of rooms. In this way the experience
of a building is a complement of the digital and the actual or
a Cybrid.
For
the STAR team, the need to ‘see’ a different image
for a building is born out of a need to recognise the multiple
points of view that the people who know of the building may have.
If traditional media technologies such as television and newspapers
provide digested and edited forms of multiple perspectives, they
do so from a particular perspective, one that many of us are rarely
able to adopt. Purchased and consumed in hard un-editable form,
the newspaper and television message both limited, and becomes
yesterday’s news very quickly. Digital technologies offer
softer alternatives, through monitoring systems in real time and
can offer interaction with messages, they are much more adaptable
and versatile. Often less determined, they are far more sensitive
to acknowledging the interests and differences inherent in the
audience, since any data that is born out of a monitoring system
embodies the audience as the source of the data which is then
re-interpreted and distributed. The difference between what we
have been used to receiving in the form of broadcast media and
new forms of network media is enormous, and many people are still
unaware of the role that new forms of news material may take.
Turning data into information is nothing new for computer scientists
or graphic designers. Much of what we experience as images to
support statistics on the television has involved some data visualisation.
Dynamic data visualisation is more interesting, but turning live
from data into information and then into knowledge is a critical
part of STAR’s Cybrid project. This emergent terrain, where
developing understanding of how an experience of a space affects
and informs peoples, needs to be cultivated. Frank Zappa once
sang that data is not information, information is not knowledge
and knowledge is not wisdom. Similarly Nathan Shedroff (Jacobson, 1999) has developed
an ‘Understanding Spectrum’ for this continuum between
data, through information and knowledge, to wisdom. Within the
spectrum he also finds that the spheres of context alter along
the line; information being a non-participatory context, knowledge
a local space with a mixture of active and inactive participation,
and finally wisdom which operates within a personal and wholly
participatory context.
If
Cybrid is to be a success the closer we can get to wisdom the
better, although as Shedroff3 says; “We [designers] cannot
create wisdom as we can data and information, and we cannot share
it with others as we can knowledge. We can only create experiences
and describe processes that offer our audiences opportunities
to find wisdom. Ultimately, wisdom is an understanding that must
be gained by the individual.”
One
form of knowledge that the experience of architecture evokes is
a social one; the influence of others activities upon our own.
Social Navigation, which can be described as the study of social
groups and their influence upon their own environments, provides
examples of the transformation of environments due to social movements.
We all actually extremely good at social navigation, probably
more so than we think; shopping. Our navigations and decisions
about where to shop, drink and eat are often determined socially
as we observe people around us shopping. How busy a place is,
how it looks, the way people dress, and how we associate with
their choices all affects where we choose to go and where to shop.
So it is possible to begin imaging that if a building were presented
in a far more complex manner we could begin to find more ways
of relating to it. And this is exactly how STAR is thinking, as
far as a specific use of Cybrid.
SlothBots;
large architectural scale robots that move at imperceptable rates
according to changes in their environment.
The
opportunities presented by the Cybrid project to explore, extinguish,
dissolve and develop contemporary understandings for how we read
and interact with architecture are apparent since the least that
the team is doing is making the invisible visible. Certainly as
the networked world encourages us to recognise distributed understandings,
what the Cybrid should reveal is the complexity of a contemporary
building, and its existence defined by its use, its people and
its environmental conditions.
References
Anders, P (2001) Extending Architecture, featured in Grinsted,
G & Speed, C. (Eds.) (2001). V01D. Plymouth, UK: The Institute
of Digital Art and Technology.
Jacobson, R. (Ed.) (1999). Information Design. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
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