the world of ollie palmer » Architectural Design

Physical Virus Overview

Ollie Palmer — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:11:24 +0000

Here’s the presentation I gave in Copenhagen last week regarding my Physical Virus project. The project is an architectural conversation about invasive species; the first step is to create a ballet performance using ants, using a series of modified printers to print pheromones and influence ant behaviour. This presentation shows briefly the main stages involved in the execution of the project, a few influences, and some videos pilfered from various places.

You can also see the first batch of ants on flickr here.

Mis en abyme videos

Ollie Palmer — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:57:55 +0000

This week the Mis en Abyme project has moved out of the realm of the purely hypothetical, research-based project and into the real world – and a step closer to the abyss of the meta-world.

And about bloody time, too, I say. The project has a fairly tight deadline – but then, we’re learning from Hofstadter:

Hofstadter's Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

So, what did we do?

First, we plugged a MacBook Pro into an external screen. Then we pointed its webcam at said screen – so effectively, there was a camera looking at a screen with the image from the camera on it. Then we pressed ‘record’. That’s it. No extra processing effects, or flash or anything like that. A camera looking at its own image produces a fairly interesting repeat-to-eternity effect, with a slight time delay between each enclosed image change. The effect can be domeonstarated by moving things about on screen, as shown here.

Please bear in mind that these videos arefairly raw and uncut. They’re ore sketches than polished, beautiful items, but should give an idea where this is headed.

Then we tried all sorts of things with looping videos. We put a prerecorded and a live video on the screen.

We put the screen sideways. This meant that our eternal repeats were each turned 90º – so the repetition turns fairly nicely into a spiral.

This video is the motherload – it lasts 8 minutes and tests loads of different things at once. It’s sideways, it has repeating videos (each with their own repeating videos inside), and the centre of the screen frequently turns into a orb. The more technically-minded amongst you will be able to decipher what is going on.

One of the most interesting things is the screen’s inclination to ‘breathe’ when nothing is happening. I assume this is due to the auto-contrast within the camera and screen, but it almost seems like the screen is alive, active even when doing nothing.

There are quite a few visual effects that emerged from this little series of experiments. The project is due to have a bit more juice pumped into it over the next few weeks – it’s pretty clear that there’s still a fair amount to go before this is an immersive, all-body experience.

View all of the videos onvimeo, and see the images on Flickr.

Perry Kulper Workshop at Bartlett

Ollie Palmer — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:39:24 +0000

This week, the AVATAR students at the Bartlett School of Architecture have been working under the guidance of visiting lecturer Perry Kulper (University of Michigan). Perry’s work investigates the potential of methodology in the working process, aiming not to create buildings, but rather to progress the cultural effectiveness and agency of architecture. Whilst working in the field of architecture and architectural education, he often eliminates buildings as an outcome, and has produced hundreds of provocative, rich and intensively laboured drawings. Spending four days under his tuition was a privilege, and the general consensus from the year group is overwhelmingly positive.

Through his academic career, Perry has identified 14 different methods that can be used within architecture, independently or interdependently. On our short dive into this esoteric pool, we studied four of these methods and worked intensively for three-and-a-half days on one of them.

The brief was to work on a motel using an Edward Burtynsky photograph as a site plan, using one of four of Perry’s methods.

Kim Walker and I worked together, and investigated gestural translation. Gestural translation, to explain in one sentence, is a process by which a gesture is translated into an architecture. The gesture can be as meaningful or meaningless as you wish, and it is generally the way in which it is translated that creates the interest.

We chose this photograph of a fragment of a ship being broken down as our site:

The process then underwent four stages:

1. The gesture

Our chosen gesture was bursting a balloon filled with water. This action took place over a scale of milliseconds and was captured using high-speed photography and video.

Finding commonalities

We found commonalities in the site, the gesture and the motel through changing state of being over time:

The ship was originally constructed from minerals from all over the world, then used for however long its lifetime was, and now is being broken down to return to its original mineral state. We could say that the ship is in a transitory state, when measured over a period of years.

The motel will serve as a temporary place for its visitors. Its activity is a transitory state, when measured over a period of days.

Whilst being burst, the balloon is effectively undergoing a state change – from being contained in a membrane to explosion to finding an equilibrium in its new form. The balloon we captured in high-speed photography is in a transitory state, when measured on a scale of milliseconds.

3. The interpretation

The ship

The ship’s line was derived by tracing the outline of the ship and the inversed outline of the ship from the Burtynsky photograph.

The motel

The motel’s line was derived by tracing the outline of one of the waves that were created from the balloon explosion.

The balloon

The balloon bursting line was derived from a tangent graph.

4. Reinterpretation

We placed all elements onto the same sheet using a variable scale.

We then plotted the intersections of the graph. The circles drawn around the loci of the intersections were structured according to the intensity of the collision; where the balloon (a ‘small’ scale) met the motel (a ‘medium’) scale, the circle was small; where the ship (a ‘large’ scale) met the motel (a ‘medium’ scale) the circle was larger.

The motel is thus represented in a transient state, similar to the three transient states it is derived from. The outcome is not necessarily a finished building, but represented through the geometric logic that has driven its creation.

The final image was printed and manipulated with paint, charcoal and wax. Click here to download a high-resolution version. Click here for the flickr image pool from the critique.

AVATAR

Ollie Palmer — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:28:58 +0000

OK, so I’ve been fairly lax with blog entries recently. That, dear readers, is not due to a lack of excitement – perish the thought! – but a general lack of time to document it all.

I will soon be developing a series of projects at the Bartlett School of Architecture as part of an Masters in Architectural Design AVATAR, studying directly under some of the people who have heavily influenced my past work. To say that I am very excited would be an understatement…