S P A C E W A L K I N G

How to exchange capacities of the moving body and the shaping of architectural space

Abstract

The experience of creating and implementing space as such is a major issue. It is in the process of architectural becoming, that the most revolutionary potentials of digital and analogue interactions reveal themselves. My paper confronts a posit made in the conference theme, saying: ‘it is still possible to claim that architecture only exist in the analogue world – that architecture as space and materiality in relation to human senses and bodies does not take shape as architecture, until it has been completed'. Spacewalking exchanges capacities of the kinesthetic body and the shaping of architectural space by use of digital and analogue interactions. The conception of a moving body as generator in the creative process is in focus in actual theories about design practice, concluding that being-a-body in its many scales is fundamentally related to how we generate spatial material. The question is not why but how the body – i.e., which aesthetical and ethical values do we incorporate in the process? How do we literally use the body to construct? Which tools, practices and logic of presentation do we evolve as modes-of-operation? The paper is based on my research-by-design project named: mixed movement in the composition plane. Here I explore the constitution of architectural space letting architectural questions appear through emerging shapes. This work will be produced as an architectural ‘game-engine', chosen as a format with potentials of intuitive transference of kinaesthetics and seamless mixes of analogue and digital movements. Spacewalking then is a prototype and teaser to mixed movement, completed in Flash format. In the paper the following issues are discussed, relating to actual design theories: ‘Give me a body then': Passage from the everyday to the ceremonial body, from normal to aberrant movement. Movement-vision: Body-movement/sensation-change – kinaesthetics as multi-dimensional experience. Affectivity and digital image: Capacity of the sensorimotor body to create the unpredictable. Body and image - splitting or doubling of perception into machinic and affective vision. The computer as embodied prosthesis. Furthermore Spacewalking is presented: Spacewalking - series of ‘becoming-other': Constituting architecture. Series of body-space creation, supplied with: Spacewalking - illustrations: Spacewalking series25.2 - sequences Spacewalking series(25)24.1 - sequences