Kim Bridgland's hairy house. First exercise.

Hot and Hairy:
biotopology and new architectural life.

Pia Ednie-Brown, with Simon Sellars and Jessica In.

“Your actions cling to you and respond to you as if they were growing out of you like fingernails. Your house becomes your pet or you become the pet of your house, or a mixture of the two.” Arakawa and Gins, Architectural Body (32)

Can we radically alter our bodies, thoughts and actions through architectural configurations? What kind of currently unimaginable relationships could we foster with our architectural surroundings?

Drawing on the techniques of Arakawa and Gins, who provocatively suggest that architecture is a tool with which to learn how to not die, we will be designing a series of research community developments, or micronations, that are designed to evolve bodies through architectural experimentation.

Based on a scenario set in about 40 years from now (2050), and with reference to relevant historical work from about 40 years ago (1970) we will test, expand upon and develop the suggestions of Arakawa and Gins, while drawing upon contemporary work wedged in the cleavage of these 40 year leaps, such as Patricia Piccinini, Stelarc, SymbioticA, R&Sie, biothing, Greg Lynn, Sabine+Jones, and others.

All students will be provided with digital ‘material’ to work with, in exploring techniques. A second class in the lab, with Jessica In, will be conducted every Tuesday night to facilitate this. Familiarity with Rhino is advisable for this studio project.

This studio will be in dialogue with a seminar with the same class time, run by Simon Sellars, ‘the body is the city’, where students will be elaborating upon and feeding into the community scenario we design, through other media such as film, images, and text.

Why? Because it took you into the thick of laboratory processes, teaching us super basic lessons like how to use a pipette to measure 0.5ml as part of an apparently ‘untouchable’ (for non-scientists) process of DNA extraction and ‘gel electrophoresis’ (a DNA analysis). All this, while throwing up larger socio-political questions with the help of a adjacent projector, such as the use of DNA analysis in forensics and the genetic modification of tomatoes. It was, as one would expect, no more than a light touch of a fingernail (not yet even scratching the surface), but enough to demonstrate that more of us should be exposed to this experience. I was convinced that what might seem like hype about the radical changes afoot via biotechnological processes is very real, and very much with us.

discussion in SymbioticA lab.