Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture

11-12 March 2006 Utrecht: Interaction is the

Crystalpunk Drug



A "Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture" event

Oudenoord 275, Utrecht



Essentially it was William Butler Yeats who defined

soft architecture as early as 1888 when he wrote:

"Behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious

beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have

no inherent form but change according to their whim,

or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand

without influencing and being influenced by hoards.

The visible world is merely their skin.". Yeats was

talking about magic, but we are thinking about

technology (and pointing out their similarities is

pointing out the obvious) that is promising to make

this worldview into a reality: equipping mindless

objects with in silico brains, turning rooms into

artificially intelligent machines. Gargoyle

computational processes evolving the optimal design

solution to a problem and printing it in 3D, in real

size. Every time you wave your hand a pandemonium of

software agents start to reason on what they could do

for you. Objects can sense and act and acquire

personalities of which the complexity rises as their

ecosphere becomes richer and more connected.

Architecture is at the forefront in applying these

ideas, at the same time it will pose new challenges to

the practise.



Between September and December 2005 the Crystalpunk

Workshop for Soft Architecture brought together a

large international group of people to think about

what all this means for spatial design and experience.

Looking back at what we learned some underlying

threads emerged. From the beginning we had only a

peripheral interest in the technology itself; we

proved it's donkey stuff of which the basics you can

learn yourself for cheap and without teachers. But

what had our real interest was what to do with it. A

room that does things for you may sound like a good

idea, at least to some, but what if locks you out of

the control structure in your own room: the inability

to switch off the lights, say. We are not interested

in silly input-output control situations of the kind

architects and product designers come up with, but in

rich Yeatsian entities that have their own life

independent of us.



For so long the marketing department can understand it

we are not interested; we want technology to become

BacterioPoetic.



In the weekend of 11 and 12 March the workshop will

open for the last time to follow up on some leads left

unexplored. Other niceties, activities and

installations by Tao Sambolic and Thomas Laureyssens,

we are like a tapas bar, will be presented on the

side.



Saturday 11 March

14.00- 18.00

BOT / AIML workshop by Mario Campanella.

From the early days of computer based interaction

bots, interfaces through which you interact with

software in normal language, have been one recurrent

strategy. Recently a new wave of interest in them has

taken place, this time to allow seamless communication

with all sorts of devices. In this informal hands-on

workshop, Mario Campanella, will first explain about

the history of bots before getting into AIML. This

"Artificial Intelligence Markup Language" provides a

framework for Bot designers to capture knowledge. The

aim of the workshop is to give you the knowledge on

how to build the 'brain' of a Chatbot: using the

general purpose AIML database, you will create new

entries for an existing one, or create your own

chatbot with a special purpose 'persona'.



It is advised to bring your own laptop and have one of

the Alice programs installed:

http://aitools.org/downloads . There are versions in

most popular programming languages.



Here you can find some of the existing AIML sets:

http://aitools.org/aiml-sets/



Sunday 12 March

14.00-19.00



Presentations by:

Mirjam Struppek

Mirjam Struppek was trained as an urban planner. Right

now she is organising the second URBAN SCREENS

conference which is the crucial event in the ongoing

formation of a new field of expertise: the (growing)

infrastructure of large digital moving displays, that

increasingly influence the visual sphere of our public

spaces. The main question being whether these screens

can become a tool to contribute to a lively urban

society, involving its audience interactively?

http://www.interactionfield.de

http://www.urbanscreens.org



Z-25

Z-25 is Utrecht based group of artists who will

present their recent "Indoor RFID" project. RFID chips

allow object to be tagged and monitored. The

expectations (fuelled by industrial rhetoric and

citizens paranoia) is that these will become an

explosively present part of society. Z-25 will show

some of its power. Who needs Amsterdam when there is

Z-25?

http://dat-a.z25.org



Adam Somlai-Fischer

Adam Somlai-Fischer is part of Aether, one of the

hottest design studios working in interactive

architecture. His work is part research and part

design, often beautiful always thought provoking.

During a previous Crystalpunk workshop he has proven

himself to be exceptionally skilled with the

soldering-iron too.

http://www.aether.hu



Pablo Miranda Carranza

Pablo Miranda Carranza runs Army Of Clerks, which

explores generative and algorithmic approaches in

architecture and design. Hoping to find utter bliss in

the relentless accumulation of unintelligent

calculations, mindless arithmetic performed by

computational armies of clerks. Carranza's work on the

electro-chemical devices by Gordon Pask unwittingly

(and after a long process of confabulation) gave the

crystalpunk movement its notion of crystals as

entities encoding data in form from which it owes the

name, for this alone he deserves his place in heaven.

http://armyofclerks.net



Nicolas Nova

Nocolas Nova is a key blogger in the world of locative

media. Recently he has been taking up an interest in

Blogjects: an example of the 'Internet of Things',

i.e. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things

enabled by miniaturization. In its most basic form, a

blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog - it is

an artefact that can disseminate a record of its

experiences to the web. He even organised a workshop

on them.

http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog

http://www.lift06.org/blogjects_workshop.php



Jelle Feringa

Jelle Feringa of the Paris based design agency EZCT is

crystalpunk's guru for Voronoi-crystals and genetic

design. Always ready to discuss radical uses of new

technology, instead of making them do old things

different, EZCT is slowly claiming fame with their

evolved chairs. Right now they are building a 3D

printer.

http://www.ezct.net



All event are free. Check the website for further

details, the same applies for technical details of the

BOT workshop.





CPWfSA initiated by socialfiction.org, produced by

IMPAKT







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WildStyle BacterioPoetics:



http://socialfiction.org