Saturday 8 September 2007, 14.00–18.00

The physically permanent identity of architecture has helped to define society for centuries. Now some practitioners have disengaged from tectonics as we traditionally understand it and are taking their discipline into the realms of ‘softspace’, a more fluid, ephemeral form of digitally-enabled design based on personalised experiences and responses. Softspace deploys new spatial systems including wearable computing, wifi, RFID and custom-designed digital software incorporating light, heat, sound and electromagnetic fields. These not only rely on people’s individual ways of interacting with them, but are enriched by narratives people contribute, creating new metaphors of use. Responsive environmental strategies of this kind have increasingly colonised museums and galleries like Tate, the Science Museum and the V&A

While the notion of a fantasy world made possible ‘on demand’ by new technologies is the theme of films like Minority Report and ExistenZ, contemporary softspace projects play a more subtle and open-ended influence on contemporary socio-spatial dynamics and our sensing abilities. Architects Usman Haque, Jason Bruges and Daan Roosegaarde and designer Despina Papadopoulos discuss the cultural implications of their work with Tate Modern curator Jane Burton and curator, author and critic Lucy Bullivant, guest editor of 4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments (AD/Wiley, 2007). Lev Manovich, the ground-breaking new media art theorist, is a keynote speaker.

Includes drinks reception in the East Room from 18:00.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£18 (£12 concessions), booking recommended
This event will be archived online: visit www.tate.org.uk

    

Softspace – Speaker biographies

Lucy Bullivant (Softspace Curator and Chair)

Lucy Bullivant is an exhibition curator, author and critic and formerly Heinz Curator of Architectural Programmes at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She trained as an art historian at LeedsUniversity and has a Master’s degree in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. She is Editor of the 2007 London Design Festival Guide, Renaissance Advocate to Yorkshire Forward (2007-9), and curating exhibitions for the London Festival of Architecture, Zhongtai (Shanghai) and IAAC, Barcelona.

Her books include Responsive Environments (V&A Contemporary, 2006), Anglo Files: UK architecture’s rising generation (Thames & Hudson/ Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 4dsocial: interactive design environments (Guest Editor, AD/Wiley, 2007), 4dspace: Interactive Architecture (AD, 2005) and Home Front: new public housing design (AD/Wiley, 2003). Lucy writes for Domus, The Plan, AND, a+u, Indesign and Volume. She regularly chairs events and lectures internationally. www.lucybullivant.net

Jane Burton is Curator of Interpretation at Tate Modern, with responsibility for interpretative materials in a range of different forms that help visitors to engage with art on show at the gallery - including gallery texts, handbooks, multimedia tours, films and interactives.  She joined Tate Modern in 1999, while the gallery was still a building site, and so the relationship between physical, architectural space and learning was a key consideration in developing her programme from the start. The desire to provide rich contextual information and diverse readings of artworks, without compromising the aesthetics of the displays, led her to introduce the first wireless multimedia tour ever to be used in a gallery in 2002, for which she won a Bafta. Integrating technically innovative projects like the multimedia tours and Tate Modern’s new Learning Zone with more traditional educational tools, all the while working with artists, designers and curators who bring their own creative agendas, is one of the challenges of the role.

Jason Bruges Studio, founded in London in 2001, creates surfaces, spaces and large scale interventions involving architecture, installation art and interaction design. Innovative technologies are adapted from a variety of industries and coupled with materials and fabrication techniques from the construction industry. 

Recent clients include Tate Britain, V&A, WhitechapelArtGallery, Allen and Overy, the London Architecture Biennale, Puerta America Hotel, Madrid, the Cultural Quarter of Leicester and onedotzero on George Michael’s latest 25Live tour. Jason trained at Oxford Brookes University and the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College of London, and worked with Foster & Partners for three years and with Imagination as a senior interactive design consultant before establishing his own studio. www.jasonbruges.com

Usman Haque is an architect specialising in responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life.

His principal projects include Open Burble, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2006, Evolving Sonic Environment with Robert Davis of the Psychology Department, Goldsmiths College (displayed in its latest version at the Netherlands New Media Institute, 2007), Project Unspecified, a low tech inflatable in Washington Square Park, New York City (2007) and Reconfigurable House with Adam Somlai-Fischer/Aether Architecture and the Reorient team, on display at ICC, Tokyo until March 2008. 

As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research, Usman has also taught in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. www.haque.co.uk

Lev Manovich <www.manovich.net> is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Manovich is a Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego <visarts.ucsd.edu> and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology <www.calit2.net>

 

Despina Papadopoulosis an interaction designer and the founder of Studio 5050, an interdisciplinary design and consultancy practice based in New York.

A graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and with an M.A in Philosophy, she has lectured extensively on wearable computing and its uses in everyday life. Her work has appeared in museums and galleries around the world, and featured in many publications and magazines. She is an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, teaching "Personal Expression and Wearable Technologies" & "The Softness of Things," courses she has developed.

Despina is currently working on the Studio’s first capsule collection of 8 interactive garments that celebrate the beauty and magic of technology traced through history and culture. www.5050ltd.com

Daan Roosegaarde sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts AKI in Enschede, The Netherlands, and took a Master’s degree in architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Based in Rotterdam, his Studio Roosegaarde founded in 2006 initiates, researches and realises art and technology projects, functioning as a laboratory in which, for each project, new alliances are made with software engineers, materials manufacturers and cultural foundations.

Projects explore the dynamic relationship between architecture, people and new media, and are a collision of technology and the human body. The Studio is currently developing artworks such as Liquid 2.0 and Dune 4.0 shown at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in 2006/7 and in the Maastunnel, Rotterdam as part of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale 2007, as a series called Liquid Constructions. Roosegaarde’s projects have been shown in international exhibitions at V2, Netherlands Media Art Institute and the 5^th Triennale, Ljubljana, Slovenia. www.studioroosegaarde.net