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A Stroll,A Fun Palace

Interactive InstallationSwiss Pavilion - 2014 Venice Biennale

Re: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace [1961-64]

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Project DirectorsSandro MarpilleroCristina Barbiani

Consultants Angela VetteseRenato Bocchi

Students Master MIA - IUAVMarco MisciosciaCristian RizzutiMorena SarzoDamiano AscenziGiovanbattista Mollo

This work is a collaboration between Sandro Marpillero and a group of students of the Master of Interactive Arts at IUAV, coordinated by Cristina Barbiani.

The project is about activating the Swiss Pavilion at the 2014 Biennale, with an interactive installation in relation to Cedric Price’s project for the Fun Palace (1961-64).

Sandro Marpillero initiated this project as a parallel activity to his role of design instructor (with Angela Vettese, Valeria Burgio, Renato Bocchi) at the Biennale-related post-graduate level IUAV/Workshop If Clause - Archiving the Impossible, which was connected to the Swiss Pavilion’s “School of Tomorrow” directed by Lorenza Baroncelli.

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These notes illustrate a video which documents the rehearsal of an interactive installation at the 2014 Biennale’s Swiss Pavilion, an experiment about exhibition formats activating the visitor’s experience of time.

A virtual recreation of the plan of Cedric Price’s (CP) Fun Palace (FP) on the floor of the Gallery allows a visitor to dynamically interact with the project’s main elements. Each movement taking place within the space of a not-visible outline of the building results in a musical performance, which is digitally mapped and eventually archived as part of the exhibition’s ongoing activities.

The video that complements these notes records the actions of two dancers, also showing a simple notational system conceived on the basis of the FP’s plan, identifying four kinds of programmatic spaces which, interpreted as “audio environments,” structure the musical score of a visitor’s performance.

The interactive installation engages the FP as a conceptual springboard for testing the shift from the theatrical impulse that inspired CP’s project, towards a contemporary activation of its relative indeterminacy through digital technologies, addressing the FP as an idea on which to accumulate and stratify multiple experiences, thus enlarging the radius of its architectural reach.

This work embraces CP’s challenge to conventional notions of architecture through the use of technology, by demonstrating the impact of media apparatuses that were not available in CP’s time, as a way to bring forward his critique to the inadequacy of the conventional actions that bring a building into existence.

These notes and the video of the installation result from our participation in the institutional experiment of the “School of Tomorrow,” which prompted a desire to further explore modes of interaction with the space and material on display at the Pavilion. The goal has been to contribute to the conversation promoted by the overall curatorial agenda of “A Stroll Through a Fun Palace.”

Sandro Marpillero

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In the context of the 2014 Biennale, the Swiss Pavilion celebrates the 50th anniversary of the FP, as a “fundamental” shift in architectural paradigms. As a project, the FP radically promoted new rituals of cultural production and reception, by conceiving a flexible building program, and allowing visitors to determine (or at least to affect) what could take place within the space/time of their experience of its spaces.

The material on display at the Pavilion is not a reproduction of that which is in the CCA’s archive, but a representation of it, insofar as it is a performance on the idea of archive that uses reproductions of drawings and documents. The FP’s physical model is the only original material on permanent display in the Pavilion’s Gallery, where ETH students bring out some of the reproductions, recovered from an Archive set up next to that space, to partially illustrate them to visitors.

It is understood that the display feature of the trolleys, shooting out from the archive in an almost-empty space, is about establishing a possible conversation. The resulting dramaturgy encourages each visitor to make sense, on one’s own terms, of the material on exhibit, although the situation encountered upon entering the Gallery may at first have been disorienting.

The Display

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The FP was meant to be an experimental and interactive building, transforming the role of a user by introducing a certain degree of controlled uncertainty in the outcome of each visit, through the spatial variability of many components, which performed different roles through flexible programming. There were two broad categories of total or partial enclosures, in relation to the scale of their volumes, and the degree of required servicing.

Our installation complements the Pavilion’s highly curated agenda of “revealing” the materials from the CCA’s archive, by offering to unprepared visitors the role of active participants. Visitors find themselves immersed in a time-based experiment that transforms them into the generative centers of interaction with the material on display, and the space of the Gallery itself.

To achieve this, we installed a Kinect on the central truss of the gallery. This is a piece of equipment that operates as a natural user interface, and is capable of activating a computer program by registering the gestures that take place within its spatial cone of capture. It relies on an infrared projector, camera, and special microchip to track the movement of objects and individuals in three dimensions.

Kin-ect is a portmenteau word, which results from the combination of the notions of “kinetic” and “connect,” both of which belong to, and define, a key aspect of the installation.

Electronic Update

Fun Palace, Cedric Price (CCA)

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Activities as “Audio Environments”

Fun Palace, Cedric Price, 1961

To translate the Kinect’s data into a performative set-up we focused on one among the many existing plans of the FP, in which “program-matic boxes” are variably distributed on different levels within the open framework defined by service columns and the top gantry.

The plan’s flexibility is a combination of the different programs taking place within each enclosed space. Yet it is also significant that the “programmatic boxes” are offered to a visitor in a variable sequence, through the availability of multiple trajectories of move-ment, therefore introducing further degrees of flexibility in relation to time, opening up a user’s range of opportunities.

Our diagrammatic interpretation of the FP’s plan identifies four types of program spaces, qualifying them for feeding, thinking, sharing, and entertainment. They are assumed as “audio environments” and used as the basis for different sound attributes, generating a flow of atmospheric characteristics that structure a virtual appropriation of the FP’s open-ended experience.

This set-up defines a field within the Gallery, corresponding to the FP’s footprint, so that a computer equipment connected with the Kinect can trace the actions performed by individual visitors. This produces a record of their movements, by correlating them to a musical composition, which in turn can be fed into the Pavilion’s Archive.

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Projection

The not-visible plan of the FP is recreated on the gallery’s floor through the Kinect’s infrared projection, which activates the di-agrammatic mapping of the FP’s plan as a visitor’s trajectory of movement enters into it.

This open structure, controlled “from above” creates a physical en-gagement with the FP’s conceptual field of opportunities, in a way that is different from the Pavilion’s current choreographed interac-tion with the material from the Archive (drawings, model).

Our installation promotes an imaginary register of interaction, with the goal of effecting an encounter between visitors and the FP’s ar-chitecture. The encouragement to stroll into a situation character-ized by uncertainty about what is visible on display outlines a path that conceptually transforms the Gallery’s space into a distinctive environment, in itself a new “Fun Palace” akin to CP’s project.

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Pixelation and Dance

The video illustrates the potential of such interaction, which could be extended from the performers acting in it to all visitors. This happens in both of the two modalities of fruition already set up in the Gallery: in full light and darkness, once the clerestory window‘s curtains are lowered. The image on the top of this page shows a body crossing the threshold of the Kinect’s field, rendering it through “pixelation,” to represent its tracking via a feature extrac-tion of 20 joints/person.

In the fully lit Gallery, visitors enter the Kinect’s cast projection, generating with their movements a new virtual mode of inhabiting the space under the pre-eminent effects of musical variations. This qualitative engagement with the “audio environment” of different areas, creates a layered score of time signatures and complex musi-cal meters.

If architecture engages the experience of space and time, and music works on time through its variable pitch, duration, and dynam-ics, dance deploys bodily movements within these frameworks. The video, in turn, scripts this layered media openness, emphasizing the convergence of indeterminate compositions and non-linear nar-ratives, making apparent their imaginary irruption into the Gallery’s space.

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Tracing Movements

While the choreography of trolleys set up in the Pavilion establishes a relationship between visitors and archival reproductions, the dark-ening of the Gallery induces a more direct engagement with the physical model. Music and moving projections cast, on the model and through its plexiglass box, colored lights and patterns towards the Gallery’s walls.

In our installation, the projected images are linked to the computer that has already traced a visitor’s movements, and continues to produce a mapping-in-evolution. This sets up a conceptually lay-ered connection with the experience of the Gallery’s space, charging with multiple interpretations a conventional mode of architectural representation such as a scaled model, through the dynamics of diagrammatic interferences and overlays.

Visitors begin to exert relative control on the correlation between their movements and musical effects, while the projector can still be moved in the Gallery’s space, variably engaging the presence of the FP’s physical model. They also acquire consciousness that a digital device is registering both movements and sound. However, the tracing of dynamic projections, that invest the physical model with light, offers only at this moment hints about the possible links that have been set between musical variations and the FP’s programmatic areas.

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Activating the Archive

During the week of July 07-13, 2014, the IUAV participated in the initiative “A School of Tomorrow” with a Workshop entitled If Clause – Archiving the Impossible, during which post-graduate students produced unreal and unfeasible projects for Venice. They invented virtual identities of urban planners, conservative defenders of the cultural heritage, political personalities and even past doges by redesigning and falsifying archives, and manipulating their documents to build up alternative future scenarios.

The Workshop’s outcome was collected in boxes of the same size and material as those of the Pavilion’s Archive, although their content explored multiple techniques of representation, from conceptual models to unfolding display surfaces for multi-scaled artifacts, pieces of board games, and vision apparatuses. Their presence on the shelves of the Pavilion’s Archive sets up a first degree of dialogue with the logic of the exhibition’s agenda.

The interactive installation, documented by the video and these notes, produces instead a printout of the tracing already visible on the computer screen, which constitutes a real-time document of each visitor’s movement. This information is saved both digitally and in physical form, offering another instance of, and a new record for, the Pavilion’s “living archive.”

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Individualized Records

The map of each visitor’s movements, printed on acetate, can be overlapped to a diagram of the FP’s programmatic environments, allowing to reconstruct the logic that generated a musical output. This physical overlay is a “score” of what has been played, whose aural experience will remain embedded in each spectator’s memory. The video documents the possibility of archiving all these variables, in a synthetic narrative.

For Joan Littlewood and CP, the FP would be fun if the visitor could be stimulated or informed, react or interact with an architecture that supports and enables activity. Fascination for technology was for them a way to celebrate the possibilities of thoughtful environ-ments, that would learn from events occurring in them, yet also react formally or mechanically to a given stimulus, by carrying memory traces of their own responsiveness.

We believe that our interactive installation at the Swiss Pavilion takes on this mandate, explicitly linking a visit to the Gallery with a “conscious distortion of time, distance, and size.” (CP, Snacks)

The video that complements these notes asserts a way of opening up the time already distorted by the exhibition’s format, by keeping “A Stroll” suspended yet also acted out into the Pavilion’s spaces, and re-producing a spatio-temporal experience for each visitor. This process of intensified interaction creates “A Fun Palace” on its own terms, rather than a passage “through” a choreographed display of CP’s radical project.

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