Philip Beesley uses robotic architectural installations to imagine fantastic and sometimes terrifying intersections of technology and organic life. I have a new article on Beesley’s work at core.form-ula:
The realization that an organism’s life is bound up with its milieu is a product of late 18th century zoology and the nascent science of biology; well into the 20th century, however, architecture continued to accord the human organism the privileged stance of the Cartesian subject, a rational occupant of a submissive exterior world. The Bauhaus radicalized the human subject’s isolation from the environment by reducing objects to technical elements of a potentially infinite, analytic system.
Beesley’s work, by contrast, attempts to challenge the occupant’s sense of self-possession by evoking the uncanny. His earlier installation Hylozoic Soil–named for hylozoism, the belief that matter is alive–inspired a sense of uneasiness as its pores breathed and rippled in response to motion. Epithelium was similarly unnerving: as the spectator walked between skeletal columns and vaults, tiny whiskers began to wave and the whole installation started to rustle and hiss. The computer that controlled the installation was distributed, simultaneously processing the input of many sensors in multiple locations (the system is called Arduino, and was implemented with the help of the MIT Media Lab). The result was a biomimetic environment whose lifelike behaviors implicitly threatened to “depersonalize” the occupant by blurring the lines between human life, animal life, technology, and environment.