Zaha Hadid Architects and SYNX at “Meta Horizons: The Future Now”
Zaha Hadid Architects and SYNX at “Meta Horizons: The Future Now”
26 May – 18 September 2022
DDP Design Museum, Seoul, Korea
The Future that Begins on May 26, 2022 at DDP
The Seoul Design Foundation is holding the exhibition “Meta Horizons: The Future Now”, the first special exhibition planned by the DDP Design Museum from May 26 to September 18, 2022.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), a pioneer in future architecture who also designed DDP alongside SYNX are involved in the exhibition. It is intended to showcase a journey of trailblazing designers to utopia. The message of the exhibition is, “The future we always imagined has already begun and the world we know will be completely changed.” At this venue, you can be immersed in the boundless imagination of how people in different fields, as well as architects, develop innovative technologies, driven by fearless passion and bold research, and of what marvelous changes the world will go through.
Mindspaces is a three-year lighthouse research project under the S+T+ARTS initiative in the Horizon 2020 research program. Zaha Hadid Architects is one of 13 consortium partners along with several invited artists collaborating to develop innovation combining design and technology research. The project focuses on developing innovation for the dynamic adaptation of architectural space and the designs of artists leveraging several technologies including multi-modal sensing (EEG, GSR), computer vision, AI, VR/AR, 3d scanning and reconstruction, textual analysis and generation, human behavioural simulation, and advanced generative design tools. Through VR based experiments with multi-modal sensing we collect data on each user’s dynamic behaviour, internal state, and explicit response to the various immersive designs presented to them to better understand relationships between the spatial design and their behaviour and emotional response.
Synthesizing sense and movement data to re-imagine our urban present, SYNX is a collaborative project developed by Eina Idea with Zaha Hadid Architects in the framework of the European Commission’s initiative MindSpaces. Originally created for the festival SónarCCCB in 2021, SYNX is a VR exhibition and essay encompassing art, architecture and interactive storytelling in a game-like experience. Co-created by a team of designers at Eina Idea in Barcelona, the immersive virtual experience includes generative design research developed by Zaha Hadid Architects as well as the current research of six contemporary artists as part of the MindSpaces residency program, an initiative of S+T+ARTS and the European Commission. These digital experiences include works by Haseeb Ahmed, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Sarah Derat x The Radicant x ExperiensS, Emanuel Gollob, Joao Martino Moura, Michael Sedbon.
MindSpaces - SYNX at THE FESTIVAL of the New European Bauhaus 2022
MindSpaces - SYNX at THE FESTIVAL of the New European Bauhaus 2022
9 June 2022
MindSpaces project, funded by the European HORIZON 2020-S+T+ARTS program, is an endeavour that brings together artists and scientists in order to tackle societal and urban city design challenges by leveraging the inspiration of the former and the technological innovations of the latter. People experience the built environment differently according to their social, cultural and economic background. The variety of this experience requires consideration if we want all users to feel that a particular space or place belongs to them. To this end, MindSpaces seeks to transform the practice of architecture by integrating the full diversity of how people experience and behave in the spaces we design through innovative, artistically-driven digital technologies. With the use of virtual reality, biosensors, artificial intelligence, algorithms and simulations, design decisions may be taken with regard to a detailed understanding of the users’ preferences and collective behaviour.
In the New European Festival, MindSpaces will present its outcomes and the current research of six contemporary artists as part of the MindSpaces residency program, an initiative of S+T+ARTS and the European Commission. SYNX is a project by Eina Idea in collaboration with MindSpaces and Sónar CCCBandincludes digital works by Haseeb Ahmed, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Sarah Derat x The Radicant x ExperiensS, Emanuel Gollob, Joao Martino Moura, Michael Sedbon, with the special collaboration of Zaha Hadid Architects. The artworks and speculative designs to be presented within a VR environment have been co-designed by a Barcelona-based team of designers under the direction of Eina Idea. Students and professors from EINA University Center of Design and Art and ESDi School of Design have also collaborated in the project. Full access to this experience will be offered in VR thanks to the partnership of Pico Interactive.
MindSpaces will be part of THE FAIR of the New European Bauhaus.
THE FAIR consists of a live exhibition (including virtual reality, 3D, and live interaction) across Brussels to showcase current and future projects, along with opportunities to meet, interact and exchange ideas, bringing together different actors who are enthusiastic about getting involved. Some of the events of the Fair are organised in both onsite and online formats. Check them all and join the Festival!
DialoG at the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art / ISEA 2022 Barcelona
DialoG at the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art / ISEA 2022 Barcelona
Dates: June 11th to June 18th. Free access.
Opening: Saturday June 11th 7pm-10pm.
Interactive /Digital Art installation in public space Plaça Corominas, Barcelona
DïaloG is an interactive urban media art installation exploring the themes of alterity, strangeness, and immigration, in a performative way. The work presents two pieces that are at the same time artworks and aliens. They are confronted with a new environment where they don’t belong to… yet. They will have to adapt their language, build common knowledge, integrating all new artifacts and natural phenomena that constitute now their environment. This includes the other living beings moving around them, and, eventually, they will have to understand each other. While we use the concept of language very broadly to include speech, performance, gesture, utterance, and even data, we focus on strangeness from an ontological perspective, trying to mark a terrain of possibilities for the intersection of interpersonal and digital experiences in the urban sphere. MoBen and Refik Anadol take the notion of “dia-logos” (through-word, through speech) embedded in the etymological roots of the word “dialogue”, more understood as an informational thread processed through an iterative feedback loop between perception, and expression, and push it to a level of transactional complexity activating the potential difference between virtuality and visuality. In this way, we aim to create a unique, site-specific language between each of both works we are presenting as living entities and their unknown public, and also, between our works that are initially alien to each other – a language of unexpected and indefinable machine expressions that adapt themselves to the constant flow of data representing real-time environmental, societal, and human actions.
DïaloG is made of two “living” visual dynamic entities facing each other in the public space. They don’t look like the living beings we know. They don’t speak any language we know. They are aliens, strangers, immigrants. They are clearly – and desperately – trying to understand each other, to understand their new environment and their strange public. DïaloG reflects on the difficulty of building a mutual understanding beyond social and cultural differences. All that makes living beings what they are: their morphology, their behavior, their ethology, and, beyond language, their cognitive functions make the laborious process of learning from strangeness and alterity a reality. Dotted with ever-growing perceptive and cognitive capacities, aware of its environment, the artwork is now able to adapt itself, to evolve and to communicate as would a more advanced living entity do. DïaloG tries to epitomize the emergence of the artwork as a subject, not only able to learn from its environment but also to dialogue with its public, and even, it may be a bigger challenge, trying to understand other artworks.
Contributions and history of the project
The DïaloG project stems from the authors’, Refik Anadol and Maurice Benayoun, respective practice in the field of generative art, that converge on this endeavor in the very context of the MindSpaces collaborative research project, “Art Driven Adaptive Outdoor and Indoor Design”, together with 12 different international partners, supported by the EU Horizon2020, S+T+Arts Lighthouse program.
Center for Research and Technology Hellas (Thessaloniki, Greece) (project leader)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki, Greece)
Universiteit Maastricht (Maastricht, Netherlands)
Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
McNeel Europe (Barcelona, Spain)
Up2Metric (Athens, Greece)
Nurogame (Germany, Koln)
Zaha Hadid Architects (United Kingdom, London)
MoBen (Maurice Benayoun, Tobias Klein, Paris/Hong Kong)
Analog Native (Refik Anadol, Germany /California, Sebastian Neitsch, Simon Weckert)
L‘Hospitalet de Llobregat (Marta Borreguero-Ribo, Catalunia, Spain)
Espronceda – Institute of Art & Culture (Barcelona, Spain)
City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media (Hong Kong SAR)
Emmanuel Van der Auwera / Seeing is Revealing at HEK
Emmanuel Van der Auwera's exhibition Seeing is Revealing at HEK - House of Electronics Art
House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland
Opening on Friday, May 13, 2022, 19:00
May 14 – August 07, 2022
Emmanuel Van der Auwera‘s exhibition Seeing is Revealing at HEK – House of Electronics Art in Basel. In his expansive video installations, Van der Auwera devotes himself to questions of perception – from the mediated experience of a world seen through a smartphone to the images that come from intelligent machines. He often refers to real events, uses existing material from the Internet, which he sorts, deconstructs and transforms into impressive aesthetic image tableaus, which mirror ethical and psychological challenges for society. For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Van der Auwera created three new works that will be on view at HEK for the first time. The exhibition offers a representative overview of the artist’s work including recent works developed during the MindSpaces Residency supported by STARTS EU and Horizon 2020.
Mindpsaces Workshop Tecla Scala with the mentalSpaces App
Mindpsaces Workshop Tecla Scala with the mentalSpaces App
What does the city’s form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city’s image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? (Kevin Lynch)
Within the MindSpaces framework, artists in collaboration with the MindSpaces consortium aim at creating solutions that highlight the cultural significance of cities and sustainability issues they are facing, as well as paradigm-shifting designs of outdoors and indoors environments. More specifically the MindSpaces pilot use case one is concerning the modern city neighborhood of L’Hospitalet in Barcelona, Spain and aims through a novel working scheme between artists, technology experts and end users to propose innovative designs that address societal challenges identified in the city with the active collaboration of the citizens.
After the data collection of various sources (social media, opinions on blogs and public platforms, questionnaires to citizens, etc.) citizens can now be engaged in the design process through several MindSpaces tools and artworks (a mobile application, a maqueta and an artistic multisensory VR experience (João Martino Moura). Through these, citizens will have the opportunity to connect and leave their “voice” and preferences in a hybrid replica of the city. Finally the results will be showcased in a Professional Round Table that will take place in Tecla Sala in May (date to be confirmed).
The scope of MindSpaces is to create an approach responsive to societal needs and challenges that incorporate new technologies in architecture and urban design. Within this framework, we are adopting parts of Kevin Lynch’s theory, from his now classic book “The image of the city”. Lynch extensively discusses the concept of imageability that is a core notion of this use case. Imageability is the quality of a place that makes it recognizable and memorable. A place can have high imageability when specific physical elements and their arrangement evoke distinct mental images or positive feelings. Through the concept of imageability we can understand people’s preferences, “hear” local community’s opinions, increase social inclusion and create a sense of belonging.
In the first round of this exercise citizens of L’Hospitalet and visitors of Tecla Sala will have the opportunity to use the ‘mentalSpaces’ app (21 March and 15 April 2022) for providing images and comments for places and sites that they will choose, while exploring the city. More specifically the aim of this experience is to identify citizens’ perception of the city utilizing the categories as defined by Kevin Lynch’s (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch) five elements: node, path, edge, district, and landmark. To achieve this the ‘mentalSpaces’ app will provide to citizens a set of predefined points that participants will be requested to navigate from and towards to. Users will be free to choose the followed path to reach their destination and take pictures along the way of distinguishable urban elements that were memorable or contributed to choosing their path. Finally, they will be requested to give one tag, or more, to the photographed elements from the Lynch categories. All of the data provided by the citizens will be visualized on a physical 3D model (maqueta) which is placed in Tecla Sala.
#startse #startseu #mindspaceseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology #eseniors #workshop #mentalSpaces #teclasala
Mindpsaces Workshop “Virtual Village”
Mindpsaces Workshop “Virtual Village”
Mindpsaces Workshop “Virtual Village”
Online
20 January 2022
On the 20th of January 2022 in the framework of the project Mindspaces, E-Seniors organised two workshops with the senior citizens in Paris, France. The main objective of the event was to observe and identify the connectivity issues of the seniors in order to create a virtual platform. “Virtual Village” is a concept of the online space where the senior citizens will gather around the different topics of their interest and create a network of like-minded citizens. The main idea is to create a “virtual village” using the contents shared by the seniors. The content can be photo-video materials, piece of art, music, literature, etc. something that reflects their memories and favourite moments.
Findings suggest that the senior citizens are a heterogeneous group in terms of their connectivity. Some of them are active users of the social networks, while others do not use social media at all. However, all the participant seniors are willing to try the new virtual platform. The seniors shared their ideas about the virtual platform, namely, they would like to interact with people and share ideas on the topics such as health, administrative issues, recommendations on the museums and cultural establishments, etc. The workshop showed that the seniors need to build a connection on their interests and invite the people to share collaborative intelligence.
The next steps include gathering more content from the seniors and build up an online platform that enables seniors to connect and communicate via an innovative online channel, reinforcing their network. E-Seniors will test the platform with its first users once the “virtual village” is ready.
STARTS #startse #startseu #mindspaceseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology #eseniors #workshop
Fifth Plenary Meeting of MindSpaces
MindSpaces Fifth Plenary Meeting
MindSpaces 5th Plenary meeting
Barcelona, Spain
2-3 November 2021
MindSpaces consortium partners had the chance to physically meet for the first time after the pandemic!
The MindSpaces fifth plenary meeting took place in Barcelona and it was held in a hybrid format with partners joining both physically and remote.
During these two days, MindSpaces partners had the opportunity to discuss all the incredible progress of the past months, report on the program’s activities and coordinate about next steps for the final months of MindSpaces.
STARTS #startse #startseu #mindspaceseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology
MindSpaces in Thessaloniki Design Week 2021
MindSpaces in Thessaloniki Design Week 2021
MindSpaces in Thessaloniki Design Week
With main focus on innovation and design, MindSpaces had the joy to participate in this year’s Thessaloniki Design Week. The event took place in Thessaloniki, Greece between 13-17 of October 2021. MindSpaces partners had the chance to showcase use cases of the MindSpaces technologies and share more about the program and its activities.
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#mindspaceseu #mindspaces #startseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology #thessalonikidesignweek
MindSpaces in SónarCCCB / SYNX 2021
MindSpaces in SónarCCCB / SYNX 2021
SYNX A project by Eina Idea in collaboration with MindSpaces and SónarCCCB
Location: Sala Raval, CCCB / Online Dates: 29 and 30 October, 2021
Eina Idea will take part in the upcoming festival Sónar+D CCCB in Barcelona with a twofold project named SYNX, consisting of a VR exhibition and a simposium. The project, as a whole, looks at contemporary urban life as an unresolved choreography of sense and movement data, emphasizing the difficulties of organizing collective response and individual action based on algorithmic principles. Social rhythms—kinetic, visual, aural, emotional—and accidents related to their programmability become the point of departure for a reflection on urban complexity in our immediate future.
The SYNX exhibition will feature art, architecture, and interactive storytelling in a game-like experience.
The show will present the current research of the six contemporary artists as part of the MindSpaces residency program, an initiative of S+T+ARTS and the European Commission. SYNX will present digital works by Haseeb Ahmed, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Sarah Derat x The Radicant x ExperiensS, Emanuel Gollob, Joao Martino Moura, Michael Sedbon, with the special collaboration of Zaha Hadid Architects. The artworks and speculative designs will be presented within a VR environment co-created by a Barcelona-based team of designers under the direction of Eina Idea. Students and professors from EINA University Center of Design and Art and ESDi School of Design have also collaborated in the project.
At SónarCCCB on October 27-30, 2021, full access to this experience will be offered in VR thanks to the partnership of Pico Interactive. Meanwhile, an embedded, online version of SYNX will be launched and made available to players worldwide through Sónar’s website and social media, alongside MindSpaces and Eina Idea communication channels.
Blending test models of private homes, offices, streets, crowd control, archaeological sites, and even virtual gallery spaces, artworks in the exhibition address the power of current technologies focused on obtaining experiential data from contemporary urban dwellers—users and performers of the everyday life amidst a web of connected devices. The goal of technologies explored in SYNX, and developed throughout the S+T+ARTS MindSpaces project, is the observation of interactions between built environments and their occupants, aiming at an increase in space adaptability and responsiveness. As a game-like architecture, SYNX presents these questions in a fictional setting where sensing technologies have become autonomous and operate capriciously, challenging the stability and reliability of their own data. In the haunted scenery of SYNX, a legend about technology becomes the narrative for the exhibition visit as an exercise in dystopian archaeology.
SYNX has been co-designed by Ignasi Ayats, Miquel Cardiel, Manuel Cirauqui, Alex Cordon, MANS O, Marta Pardina, Flor Salatino, and Alexandre Viladrich, with the assistance of Clara Cubo-Gasch, Dani Hernández Palomeque, Júlia Hernández González, Iraida Serlavós, and the special collaboration of Marianna de Nadal.
The virtual exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium streamed live on October 29th, in which the exhibition artists and designers will share ideas with leading voices in science, urban planning, artistic research, and design fiction to discuss the topics of SYNX. Guest participants in the symposium include Elena Bartomeu, novelist and speculative design professor at EINA; Lluís Nacenta, musician, theorist, and director of HANGAR; Artur Garcia, head of quantum computing at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center; and Mel Slater, neuroscientist and virtual environments expert at the University of Barcelona. The event will be conducted and moderated by Béatrice de Gelder, head of the Neuroscience Laboratory at Univerity of Maastricht, and Manuel Cirauqui, director of Eina Idea, and will include a virtual tour of the exhibition. The SYNX Talk Show will be presented at the auditorium of CCCB in Barcelona and as an online broadcast via Sónar’s website.
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#mindspaceseu #mindspaces #startseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology #sonar2021 #sonar21 #barcelona #einaidea
Sónar+D CCCB2021 will take place place 29-20 of October 2021. You can learn more about the events in the following link:
MindSpaces in Ars Electronica 2021
MindSpaces in Ars Electronica 2021
MindSpaces had the chance to be part of the Ars Electronica 2021, one of the biggest new media art festivals in the world. MindSpaces presented activities related to its technologies, digital artists and artists in residency.Thessaloniki Garden hosted the MindSpaces project, funded by the European HORIZON2020-STARTS program.
MindSpaces Garden hosted a) a teaser of an upcoming exhibition showcasing the research of the Open Call artists in collaboration with the technical partners of the MindSpaces consortium b) the ZHA Workplaces.AI interactive app, which allows each user to generate their own workplace environments by manipulating design parameters to simulate how a crowd of workplace “agents” behaves within it and experience it immersively and, c) an online meet-up that will bring together the artists and architects of the MindSpaces consortium.
The live discussion recording will be available soon in MindSpaces Youtube channel.
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#mindspaceseu #mindspaces #startseu #horizon2020 #innovativedesign #VertigoStarts #science #artandtechnology #MauriceBenayoun #RefikAnadol #arselectronica2021 #gardenthessaloniki #arselectronica