Generative sensory space to activate the creativity of all exhibition visitors
Visitors create and shape an immersive space of color, light, form, texture, movement and sound with every body movement. The classic relationship between viewer and exhibit is completely reversed, which is why every visitor suddenly finds themselves at the center of a creative process. All actions influence each other, which makes the design process a shared experience.
In addition to the individual reception of works during the tour, visitors are once again confronted with all stylistic periods in the “Sensory Landscapes”, only this time the focus is on the creative thinking and production process. While the atmosphere of the room continues to fill and intensify through ever new stylistic elements, radical changes or gradual transitions ensure a new beginning time and again. Each incipient style creates space for new inventions, which the visitor can explore in his active role as designer with his senses of sight, hearing, movement and balance. The range of epochs opens with the ornamental sweep of Art Nouveau and ends in the open space of expectation of the present. In the midst of a fragmented flood of images that is constantly fed and updated via links to global art and design forums on the Internet, visitors themselves choose which path they want to follow. When he moves towards an interesting fragment of a picture, a new space opens up through which his thoughts take shape for all those present. The change in style periods makes it clear that every creative act of design begins with a new departure that prompts us to abandon familiar patterns of thought and behavior. Without the will to change and active action, the “sensory landscapes” fade and become part of the individual memory.
Experimental laboratory for the playful mediation of design processes
The seamless 360° projection, generated entirely using mathematical codes, which captures every movement in space and translates it into audiovisual structures, can be seen for the first time worldwide in an artistic application. The “Sensory Landscapes” are the new experimental laboratory of the “Grassimuseum”, where contemporary art is created and can be accompanied in the research process. Younger target groups experience the museum as a place where connections between the past and present of applied art and design can be experienced and explored in a playful way. The computer-generated seating elements can be moved freely around the room and combined to form islands. Their crystalline form has no clear reference planes, which reinforces the feeling of disorientation and impairs the sense of balance. The white cube forms the interface in which every random or action-motivated movement immediately takes shape. The modern generative technology, consisting of the graphic development environment “vvvv”, a 360° projection matrix, an 8-channel audio system and interactive motion sensors from infrared spotlights and video cameras, remains almost invisible. All behavioral states are permanently evaluated by a data stream-oriented programming language and broken down into defined design parameters. Hundreds of nodes form a style matrix that evolves every moment and is still open to creative ideas. Chance thus becomes a constant source of ideas and motivation. Digital impulses are translated into shapes, colors, patterns, movements and sounds and projected into the white cube, whose boundaries, proportions, dimensionality and atmosphere are constantly being generated anew. No two pictures are the same. Everything is variation and shape-seeking change.
The interactive spatial installation “Sensory Landscapes” was developed in collaboration with the Grassi Museum by a team led by Axel Buether. The team includes Sebastian Huber, Johannes Timpernagel, Robert Pohle and Isabella Kolata as well as Marko Ritter, Jakob Korn and Ingolf Heinsch.
“Art Nouveau to the present day”
Permanent exhibition at the Grassimuseum, from March 4, 2012
GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts
Johannisplatz 5-11
04103 Leipzig
Opening hours: Tue-Sun, incl. Public holidays 10-18 h
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