Venice Biennale Hall of Fragments

Cinema constructs alternate architectural universes, places where designers can create environments that are free from the material and gravitational restraints of corporeal life. Bullets can be dodged, tall buildings leapt in a single bound, and houses dropped on unsuspecting witches with no damage to the young girl inside. This is truly architecture beyond building, a place bound only by imagination and the limits of projection technology.

This interactive installation sets the stage for “Architecture Beyond Building” by exploring how cinema’s freedom from physical restraints influences perception and behavior. The immersive environment is built of images from iconic films, presented in a manner where the visitor’s behavior influences, or authors, the cinema experience: The motion of inhabitants dynamically affects the sound and imagery on two curving screens – in a real-time simulacrum of the feedback loop between cinema and architecture.

As the visitors move between the screens, images from films will appear in a cascade of crystalline fragments. Based on algorithms coupled with motion sensor devices, a visitor can make film fragments grow into columns of three-dimensional textures, whose shapes may expand and overlap those from other visitors to create larger figures and infinite variations. Backstage, behind each screen, visitors find a pool of smaller screens monitoring the 30 film clips that feed the content of the installation. Each visit, each movement will create a distinctive architectural experience of a familiar set of images. Those architectures are not prescriptive. They instead offer opportunities.