kiNET Description |
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kiNET is an active wall. A wall that performs, changes, shifts, adapts. We want walls to respond to us, walls that can alter themselves, and with them, alter the space they define. kiNET explores the concept of animation. It is an ANIMATED SURFACE that turns the spectator into an actor. By re-acting to human presence with different behaviors/patterns, kiNET requestions the materiality (or immateriality) of our built environment, shifting the perception from stasis to motion, from inert to responsive, from flat to curved, from decoration to decor-action. kiNET blurs the boundary between architecture and media art. The wall is no longer an opaque plane that encloses our bodies in a space, it is rather an artistic intervention in a space, a window, a painting, a canvas. Only the canvas is not a static surface on which the artist lays his work, it is a body in movement, a mural constantly redrawn by the actor/spectator who performs in the defined space. kiNET is a disperse distributed system composed of actuation nodes scattered on a surface. As the actuators are driven by electromagnetic fields, no visible mechanics are involved, and thus it eludes the obvious and embodies some mystery and magic within it. It produces a low metallic tickling sound that propagates through the surface, driving attention beyond the visual, appealing to a wider engagement of the senses and the body. kiNET addresses a critique towards the latest development in the field of design as a consequence of the digital revolution. Digital design technologies enhanced the abstract space of design, both conceptually and instrumentally, extending the limits of what can be thought in relation to what can be drawn. Animation tools have been influencing design through its ability to engage transformation and variability in time. Designers and artists share an urge, a secret obsession about these notions of movement and temporality, and have constantly struggled to reinvent new ways of addressing these questions. Digital technologies, advanced CAD and animation tools have provided a new way to explore these issues. Or have they?
Today, these questions can only be asked in the abstract space of design, and there is still an enormous gap between digital design and concrete implementation and actual products. Our own obsessions deal with anxieties when faced with of the (im)possibility of transposing the digital into the real, the virtual into the concrete. kiNET attempts to break these anxieties, jump through that gap.
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