Constructing agency 2017-2019

alife

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Dahyun Kim (Korea), Didem Sahin (Turkey), Ding Ming Wang (China), Nicholas Rawitscher Torres (Colombia)

Alife proposes to encompass technology as culture, and to think about technology not just as shiny gadgets and chips, but rather as a self-reproducing network which is made of different interrelated pieces which form a larger system. Within this we envision a symbiotic relationship between Alife and people where both will learn from each other and evolve as an ecology. As part of this research we have chosen a Brain Computer Interface as a framework to explore different kinds of man-to-machine correlations, were the system units can understand people through their brain wave activity.

The unit is an autonomous entity that has the ability to move freely in 3-dimensional space. Machine learning was used, in order to develop individual unit behaviours without the necessity of pre-programming, as well as to investigate different types of cooperative behaviours between units to achieve various goals in mobility and self-organisation. Our system is based on a local communication system between each agent, creating different types of spatial atmospheres that change continuously according to its population, users and environmental forces. Alife has strategies of self-assembly where each individual component can organise and re-organise without any predefined blueprint in order to create different scales of intervention.

The project uses live data collected from the city as well as local data produced within the system to communicate emotive and atmospheric patterns and to determine deployment within the city. Based on this we propose a borderless system which is time-based, atmospheric and can operate at any scale. With London as our prototypical site, the project aims to be a new type of architecture that can augment how we relate to ourselves, the environment and machines. Through this design and research, Alife envisions a new form of culture that understands that the same patterns that exist in every single organism on Earth – the existence of DNA that includes a structure reliant on the presence of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen molecules – can also be designed into non-human creations.