Exhibition
Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms - AA School
The Architectural Association School launches Enabling, The Work of Minimaforms, an exhibition inviting Londoners to experience work by the artists that created Memory Cloud, the public art installation that took over Trafalgar Square in 2008. Hailed as one of the public art events of the year, Memory Cloud was based on smoke signals - one of the oldest forms of visual communication, for three nights the public was invited to participate by sending text messages that were grafted onto plumes of smoke. Thousands of people took part.
Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms
Private View 1800hrs, Friday 26 February 2010, followed by:
Opening Performance: The exhibition opens with Machina Speculatrix (A Machine that Watches) a light and music spectacular, performance with Mira Calix, creating and enabling music from artificially intelligent machines at 1930hrs on Friday 26 February 2010, at the AA School’s Terrace.
Brothers, Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos are the duo behind Minimaforms. The new exhibition explores the creative projects they are developing, often in collaboration with leading artists from around the world. The work explores communication as an enabling interface between the everyday and the urban environments that surround us. Projects on display include:
Memory Cloud, Fusing ancient and contemporary forms of communication, Memory Cloud creates a dynamic hybrid space that projects personal statements as part of an evolving text, animating the built environment through conversation.
Vehicle, a collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko is a mobile environment that operates as a communication vehicle. The vehicle creates a public space of conversation to stimulate engagement between veteran’s and the public.
Living Pod Revisit: A contemporary revisit of Archigram member David Greene’s seminal projects the Living Pod and High-Rise Tower. This futuristic living cityscape is created through dynamic interaction of living units constructing animalistic architectures. Units evolve behaviours collectively organising new spatial structures of a future city.
Brunel Gateway Pavilion developed through an invitation of world renowned performance artist Stelarc to create a gateway structure for Brunel University. The intervention conceives a threshold space suspended above an existing reflection pool as an exterior room and sanctuary using a series of operable lens that amplify and collapse the relationships between the users and the context.
Facebreeder: is a project developed to speculate on a future vision for London. Beyond buildings Facebreeder was constructed as an identity machine, that invited participants to contribute their portraits as part of an evolving database. The database broadcasted a 3x 3 matrix of hybrid monstrous portraiture.
Theodore Spyropoulos from Minimaforms and Co-Director of the Architectural Association Design Research Lab says: “Our work attempts to enable novel forms of communication, evolving relationships between our environment and each other.”
A full-colour publication documenting the projects will be launched at the exhibition opening. Also titled Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms, it includes contributions from Stelarc, David Greene, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Brett Steele, Bronac Ferran, Andrew Benjamin, Marie-Ange Brayer and Roger F Malina.
