Aria: Sentient Constellation

A Living Lab for TU Delft Science Centre

Delft Science Centre, Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG) and Philip Beesley Studio Inc. (PBSI) have brought an immersive environment that functions as a public sculpture and a testbed for evolving research to TU Delft. This multi-year project frames a permanent installation of public art on the campus of TU Delft, presented in cooperation with the municipality of Delft, TodaysArt, numerous artists from the Netherlands and Canada, and educators in STEAM. This project is working in close collaboration with TU Delft’s Architecture and Engineering departments and multiple Canadian research contributions. A new LASG sculpture and testbed will be installed at the entry of the new Science Centre facility. The project will act as a public beacon that gathers the public, expressing a sustainable, inclusive vision of future design. This building provides a public face to the University, located at the boundary of the Delft Campus with the city. This site provides strategic connections to the campus and city. The location also relates to a large cluster of experimental architectural structures featuring next-generation construction, alternate energy sources and sustainable material systems. The prominent central location will present views to the exterior that reach out and along the green lawn that connects the Science Centre to the main circulation spine of the University and areas of the city of Delft. To the interior, the installation will lead to areas for evolving student design explorations and additional workshop-based activities.

Testbed Sculpture

Multiple events will be programmed during the coming period. Workshop with the Interactive Environments Minor curriculum of TU Delft, presentation at the Delft Highlight Festival, experiments with researchers and graduate students, and events for families and young people will lead toward further development of this evolving, open sculpture. These activities will include explorations in fabrication and behaviour programming, working with experimental architecture and interactive systems teams. Building upon these exchanges, the group will install a permanent testbed that will be used for events, ongoing research and curriculum development around responsive, sentient architecture. This construction will also serve STEAM education for young people and general exhibition display for interested members of the public. The installation builds on outstanding successes of earlier LASG collaborations with TU Delft including ‘Anthozoan Veil’, an immersive environment developed during a workshop in 2018 at Delft followed by installation at The Hague’s Elektrikfabriskeit building for TodaysArt, workshops with the Interactive Environments Minor and Architecture 2020-23, and a collaborative installation located at the Tilburg Textielmuseum in collaboration with Iris van Herpen. Student research exchanges between TUD industrial design and the University of Waterloo’s Toronto LASG studios have supported this work. Substantial contributions from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Canada Council for the Arts have provided additional funding.

Integration of Spatial Sound

The LASG has partnered with 4DSOUND Technologies, an Amsterdam-based studio focusing on spatial sound as a creative medium to create immersive experiences and sound design tools for sculptures of different sizes, characters, and contexts. The TU Delft test-bed will incorporate a cutting-edge spatial sound system, merging custom software and hardware innovations.The system features a modular spatial audio software framework designed to support the involvement of artists and technical collaborators. This spatial sound system creates a sculpture-like presence of sound in time and space. The physical installation functions like a spatial sound canvas, supporting sound holograms.

Living Shadows within ARIA

The Living Shadows features integrated within ARIA support an augmented reality experience that explores the intersection of physical and virtual worlds through the medium of shadowplay. This work investigates how the shadows of a physical object might be augmented with the shadows of animated creatures and field conditions that exist within a virtual world. The aim of the Living Shadows project is to create a virtual world that is closely linked to its physical counterpart. In this virtual world, a digital twin takes on a life of its own, with actions and influences that are projected back out into the physical world and made visible through the interplay of light and shadow on objects and their surroundings. Overlaid on a physical work, this virtual world of living architecture evokes new dimensions for exploring the lives of virtual beings immersed within environments. The creatures that inhabit this virtual world help develop the identity of a sculpture’s static physical components. Action composed within the virtual environment is related to the particular components and organizations of physical fabrications within LASG sculptures. The Living Shadows project explores behaviours that these assemblies might manifest if they were given autonomy and set free within a virtual environment. This project represents an early step in the Living Architecture Systems Group’s exploration of augmented reality environments.