Enter the sensitive field →→→ Agitate the SwarmMove around the METAFolly →→→ Generate ripples of sound →→→ Experience the Swarm's dissolution and synchronisation
Enter the METAfolly →→→ Decode emergent sonic patterns and niches
META-Folly for the Metropolitan Landscape, commissioned by the Frac Centre, revisits the architectural “folly” type as a synthetic organism. META-Folly argues for computational cyber-artificiality to substitute nature as reference for the development of new architectural codes; offering refuge and consolation to the emerging crowd of urban postecologists, META-folly gives up searching for a green Arcadia and is determined to embody a “shanty” version of it. The project draws the line of a future convergence of cybernetics and environmental psychology, digital computational design and parametricism, digital craftsmanship and DIY interaction design, radical ecologic thinking and material activism. The outcome may be an improbable assemblages of “urban trash” (recycled polypropylene, hacked sound kits, steel rods, chameleonic nano-flakes) but within it we find a new aesthetic, spatial and material milieu, a new form of engineered life. A field of digitally materialized sensitivity agitates a proliferation of 300 piezobuzzer analogically modulated in 4 different tones; programmed to operate like a swarm of crickets they react to the speed of visitors’ movements around the folly, developing ripples of sound that bounce back and forth until dissolution, synchronisation or complete interference; the convolutedness of the geometry produces the emergence of unique sonic niches to be decoded by the human ears inside the folly.
ecoLogicStudio Design Team: Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto with Andrea Bugli, Philippos Philippidis, Mirco Bianchini,
Fabrizio Ceci, Phil Cho, George Dimirakolous, Manuele Gaioni, Giorgio Badalacchi, Antonio Mularoni, Sara Fernandez,
Daniele Borraccino, Paul Serizay, Maria Rojas, Anthi Valavani.
Interaction Design Consultant: AltN Research (Nick Puckett)
