Artificially alive artwork tantalises and surprises

Michael Slezak, Australasia reporter

Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Series: Sibyl, 2012. Installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012) at Cockatoo Island. Courtesy the artist

What if the buildings around you were alive, and responded to your touch? Hylozoism - the theory that everything is alive - is the philosophy behind Philip Beesley?s Hylozoic Series: Sibyl, an exhibit at the border of architecture and science fiction that is now on display in Australia at the 18th Biennale of Sydney.

Equal parts robotics, chemistry and prototypical architecture, the exhibit is a distributed network of interactive, moving and almost living elements. ?I would say this is a work of sculpture and a work of architecture,? says Beesley, a Canadian artist and architect.

At first glance, the installation appears to be a rainforest winter wonderland suspended from the ceiling. But it is anything but whimsical: the technology behind this responsive environment can be found in touchscreens, and the science could inform the future of architecture.

There?s no instruction manual for how to interact with the sculpture: you have to learn by doing. As you walk beneath it, you pass through branches extending almost to the ground, covered in inviting, icicle-white fronds whose strings just about beg you to pull on them. The moment your skin makes contact with them, they confidently vibrate, a response that leads many otherwise inhibited art-viewers to let out a surprised yelp. As the vibration starts, the fronds curl upwards in a wave before the whole thing slowly returns to a sleep-like resting state.

It turns out the string is actually a capacitive sensor, much like a touchscreen. The slightest touch to these actuated fibres changes the current flowing through them, leading to the vibrations. Another section of branches contains infrared sensors that trigger movement and lights based on proximity.

The information from all these sensors feeds up to a centralised computer that triggers larger patterns across the whole work - from gentle tidal waves of motion to localised storms of activity - as well as breath-like undulations in large, soft bags mounted on the ceiling.

By interacting with the various aspects, you do start to learn how they work, at least as individual elements. ?When someone touches one thing you?ll get a local reflex immediately,? Beesley says. ?That thing will send out a small burst of light and quite possibly a kinetic shiver through it.?

Although he may have designed the emergent behaviours of the installation itself, it seems he stumbled upon a truly organic emergent behaviour - one among the viewers of the work. And watching others engage with the art is at least half the fun. Wide-eyed viewers walk among it, waving at it and tentatively reaching out to it and then recoiling in an amused fright as it moves in response to their touch.

Genuinely fascinating behaviours emerge from the simple and complex interactions between viewers and the sculpture. The fronds - or actuated filters, as the artist calls them - look so fragile that despite clearly being an interactive work, few people touch them, and those that do take great care. ?You see a remarkable kind of care with the work - almost a stewardship emerges within the people. They teach each other to behave,? Beesley says.

As you pass through the moving fronds, you may find yourself tempted by a sweet perfume. The scent is emanating from flasks of clear liquid suspended in a delicate, web-like structure above large frozen drips. Some of these tempt the viewers with their perfume. Some are perfectly clear, as if they hold cool water. Others are misty and others look frankly off-putting, with slimy-looking materials inside them.

This is the hidden chemistry angle of the exhibit. One of the flasks contains a simple carbon-capture system - containing mostly sodium hydroxide - that slowly absorbs carbon from the atmosphere and stores it in chalky deposits. The other is a kind of model of a cell that contains copper sulphate and potassium ferricyanide. Beesley says the layers of chemicals in the flask ?interact together to make a beautiful kind of blooming delicate copper felt - a skin that very slowly builds itself?.

In the future, he hopes to use these chemicals to make strands of skin-forming material that could move outward and clothe the scaffold. ?But that makes a pretty big mess,? he admits, ?so we?re happy to house them in glass for now.?

Beesley has already built some of the concepts behind the project into highly acclaimed designs, and in particular, his collaborator Rachel Armstrong is working with a paint company to develop paint that captures carbon. Like Armstrong?s paint, beneath their whimsy the principles underlying every part of the installation are thoroughly and directly practical, and could be incorporated into the buildings of the future, Beesley says: ?The work could be seen as a kind of a projection of possibility for a future architecture.?

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2101dd56/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A120C0A70Chylozoic0Esydney0Ebienniale0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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