Here is the video, on Vimeo, with conference abstract below:

Open Wide, Come Inside: laughter, composure and architectural play. from pia ednie-brown on Vimeo.

This video is a presentation for an academic online conference in March 2010: the 3rd International Arakawa and Gins Architecture and Philosophy Conference. http://ag3.griffith.edu.au
It is the video presentation for the Art and Architecture stream of the conference. The video is composed as a mock episode of the children’s TV show, Play School, intersecting with an academic paper.
This is the abstract for the paper:

My video presentation, which I am aiming to land somewhere between a lecture, an intimate confessional, and the pre-school TV show, Play School, is concerned with the way in which Arakawa and Gins have generated an evolving open system, and the mechanisms through which that system elusively hold together despite radical internal disparity. I suggest that this openness is sustained through simultaneously resisting coming to rest or finding explanatory closure, while maintaining a firm grasp on an elusive quality of connection. Turbulence, vitality and incongruity enter co-created loopiness, openly snowballing into a perpetual motion machine. Their buildings are an integral part of this machine, but their architecture is that machine.

But its not really a machine, it’s an organism-person-environment dynamic – a three part cleavage that plaits infinite strands of hairy connection into an open loop. What most arouses my interest, is the performative, transversal nature of their compositional glue – or in other words, what holds this dynamic together, and keeps it rolling. This I try to personify in terms of the architecture of shared laughter. The act of laughing together becomes an affective diagram and embodiment of their notion of bioscleave.

These characteristics of Arakawa and Gins make them exemplary cases of what I describe as ‘ethico-aesthetic know-how’ – or the art of emergence, which at best is a capacity to resonate in a heightened awareness of affectivity amidst all our organism-person-environment engagements. Here, we find a compositional coherence that is dynamically behavioural, something that might be found, say, in the complex of feelings that animate a face into a smile, rather than in the formal arrangement of a smiling face. And from there the question becomes, what can this teach about composing buildings that can laugh along with us?

In November 2009, we held a 5 day intensive workshop in the ‘digital wet laboratories’ in the School of Applied Science (Biosciences) at RMIT. The workshop is run by Oron Catts and Greg Cozens, of SymbioticA.
The workshop is an introduction to biological techniques and issues surrounding the manipulation of living systems. Artists, designers and researchers from various disciplines engage in the biological science lab to utilise language and techniques into their practice and research. Through applied ‘hands-on’ methods, the broader philosophical and ethical implications of human intervention with other living things will be explored.
The workshop is part of the ARC Discovery research project we are doing.
Regular posts were made to the Plastic Futures blog, where there will also be a twitter feed for any of the participants who engage in such practices.
A day by day account can be found in here: Plastic Futures

you need to click on the image to see it properly though:

This is a link to Keith Armstrong’s site and his page on Intimate Transactions, a multi-user interactive work. There is a very good video there explaining the multiple dimensions of the work and its process of development.

I was involved in designing and developing the haptic feedback system for this project (shown in images below), with Inger Mewburn. We did this collaboration back in 2004. Since then the interactive has travelled the world extensively, with significant acclaim thanks to Keith’s excellent direction of the overall project.

Detailed discussions about our role in this project, and what we learnt from it can be found in two places:

1. My doctorate, The Aesthetics of Emergence, see ‘Vibrating Bodies’: pp. 240-268.

2. Ednie-Brown, Pia and Mewburn, Inger, (2006) ‘Laughter and The Undeniable Difference Between Us’, in Hamilton, Jillian (Ed.) Intimate Transactions: Art, Exhibition and Interaction within Distributed Network Environments, Australian Centre for Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology.