Event overview
Philip Beesley will present a series of recent field-oriented installations and will offer a post-humanist context.
Philip Beesley will present a series of recent field-oriented installations and will offer a post-humanist context. Illustrated projects will include the Hylozoic Soil series, an immersive interactive reef construction composed of overlapping flexible meshworks populated with kinetic pores, recently installed in
Montreal, Linz and Madrid, and the 2008 UCLA installation Endothelium, a skeletal tripod-field powered by densely massed organic power units and organized as unit-clusters forming a continuous lattice outfitted with faint signal-lure lights, microprocessor-controlled burrowing agents and space-filling filter packs. Drawing from the specific behaviours and interactive affects of these installation, notes toward certain paradigms for 'responsive architectures' will be offered. In contrast to prominent voices within a mid-twentieth century generation of designers that held the spectre of interactive design in optimism, insidious qualities embedded within those visions have been widely remarked in post-Structuralist generations of discussion. In a historical argument, and as a fragile resolution, this talk will cite the geologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin's theory of coherent world organization that might in turn result in a 'noosphere' of collective consciousness. In turn, the American psychologist Donald Winnicott's conception of 'transitional objects' in which fragments such as much-loved blankets and toys overlap with an infant's self-world appears effective in focusing key terms of personal spatial interaction. The argument pursues mutually dependent relationships.
Philip Beesley is a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo (Canada) who practices digital media art and experimental architecture. His work in the last two decades has focused on field-oriented sculpture and landscape installations, with extensions in stage design and buildings. His projects in the past several years have increasingly worked with immersive digitally fabricated lightweight 'textile' structures, and the most recent generations of his work feature interactive kinetic systems that use dense arrays of microprocessors, sensors and actuator systems. Distinctions for his work include the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), VIDA 2009 and FEIDAD 2008 awards, the Governor-General's Award, and two Dora Mavor Moore Awards. He holds degrees in visual art at Queen's University and in architecture at the University of Toronto, both summa cum laude, and received a diploma in technology at Humber College, He was a member of art and performance collaboratives Open Series and Studio Six/Kataraque in Kingston and the George Meteskey Ensemble in New York. Periods of study were undertaken in Rome at the Vatican and the American Academy and in New York with the Wooster Group. Prior to beginning his practice he apprenticed in instrument making and in lighting design.
www.philipbeesleyarchitect.com
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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10 Jun 2009 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm |
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