A one week workshop at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at the RMIT in Melbourne.

The ubiquity of electronically-conditioned cultures within the context of contemporary social transactions invigorates a dialogue between states of materiality and states of immateriality. This one-week workshop explicitly examined the transduction of informed states between a series of material and immaterial sites causing a reconsideration of these categories. These informed states were specific to the media in which they originate and was be defined by each team at the start of the workshop.

The workshop was part of INTIMATE DISTANCE: Liveness and Affect, a Visiting Fellows Program part of the SIAL Graduate Certificate Program. It was performed as an inserted catalyst in the mid of a seven week design course directed towards the design of an exhibition space. Student teams had prepared outlines that could be transformed and enriched during the workshop.

Info_liations / ex_foliations brief suggested a networked feedback environment that would emerge as a number of nested environments or nodes that maintained a micro scale of physical – digital connected spaces, affecting each other through more or less perceivable principles. A number of these nodes, comprised of a digital setting and a physical interface, would be connected and send and receive information trough transactions. These points of contact were established early on in the workshop and the different teams operated simultaneously in the various media continually activating these contact points throughout the duration of the workshop. Protocols for this exchange were established, using the Urbantoys v.2 as a reference, and the Virtools software package as a main platform.

Through this set-up, the student teams provided flexible designs in which behaviours or scripts could be exchanged during the development, and outside guests could manipul,ate the conditions of the design, thereby entering an open-ended dialogue on design qualities.

SIAL, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia August 2003
Tutors: Krets, through: Marcelyn Gow, Daniel Norell and Jonas Runberger