Our task is to come up with design solutions for these three elements:
- Represent the environment
- Represent the microbes within that (protagonists)
- Perceptual apparatus - how to show in the exposition
Representing the Environment
How do microbes experience the world?
- sense of smell
- chemical interactions
- chemical compositions: asphalt, wood, soil, cement
Katamari -> Hives -> Things are adhering to it -> We are interested in the whole, things interacting together, not in the individual compnents.
Perfume the film --> Tools: how to see air?
Perceiving the chemical element of the environment --> chemical composition of the environment
How to map chemicals to pixels?
This project uses bees as sensors, as citizen scientists - so this should not be focused on the bees, but on the microbes.
In the context of architecture:
- How can you design for microbes in mind?
- Architecture at the micro scale
- What are the micro environments? Textures: wood, asphalt, etc.
- Micro textures
- Topologies of the micro scale
We want to have a dialog with the invisible - if the table could talk, what would it say about its microbes?
Flow fields
https://www.chromeexperiments.com/experiment/fluid-and-particles-in-webgl
We discussed at length about using flow fields to represent the movement of the microbes in space using this scientific paper as reference: LINK TO PAPER
Flow going around the objects - a car comes and swipes away the particles -> Microbial Flow Area
Sensory Humoculous
Remapping the world from the microbes perspective
How to volumetrically map the world?
References:
- http://bengler.no/terrafab
- http://www.wired.com/2015/04/laser-scans-london-new-way-see-world/
- http://berglondon.com/products/hat/
- http://www.specular.cc/
- http://www.depthkit.tv/
Ideas:
- Volumetrically recording an area --> like 1 street -> like Google street view if the "car" was a microbe
- Expand edges and shrink surfaces
- Textures - accentuating the textures
Main ideas that surfaced:
- Flow --> Travel (macro)
- Crevasses --> the microbe's home (micro)
Flow
We decided to go with the flow idea.
Looking at the city at large scale
Spacial information