Teresa Almeida – New Spaces for New Bodies – or How to Inflate Your Life – 2004

First publication in the workshop Space: Science, Technology and the Arts in collaboration with ESA/ESTEC, 2004

Ever since I can remember that I have this recurrent dream where I’m flying and, suddenly, I start falling and wake up. This feeling of vertigo is often illustrated by an immense mixture of colors and sounds. This all happens in a matter of a few seconds.

“An inflatable structure responds to a programme. Its architecture is not a static structure which is calculated to resist to biggest possible forces. The inflatable structure is a lean device which relaxes when external or internal forces are modest, and tightens when the forces are fierce. It acts like a muscle [1].”

My aim is the creation of a wearable architecture as an immersive environment, portable and inflatable, to be experienced in Zero-G. It’s a wearable for the ‘Living Anywhere’ Man. This specific I-Wear would be an artifact of the future moving theatre/cinema.

The ‘Living Anywhere’ Man is a metaphor for the traveler, the urban nomad, the contemporary Man. This 21st century man lead to the urgency of new concepts of ‘place’, such as transit spaces – places of transition, ‘non-places’, like airports and train stations, motorways or even campers and caravan parks. And ‘place’ is referred as the relation between space/time, synergy, form and structure. “nomad incorporates the whole of space under his own skin, because his tent is a house that never interrupts his progress, but on the contrary accompanies it: space is an extension, a prosthesis or vehicle for his own movement [2].” An example of a nomadic structure can be seen in Fig. 1.below.

Fig. 2. The idea of dissolving static space and physical boundaries, of wearing the habitat as an extension of its own body, responding and reacting accordingly to either need or environment, pleasure or obligation is a representation for/of the constant flow, the continuity that characterizes one’s life and the way one observes and is absorbed by the environment. By creating an immersive world of our own we are able to select the information we want to have access to. We then have a second layer of ourselves, an epidemic filter or an extension beyond the surface of our bodies which still allows our drifting.

Wearing this layer of skin will permit creating a unique system of sound and vision. In the absence of gravity this layer, made of inflatable material, will be given shape(s) and form(s) which will be determined by its user and its capacity of manipulating it while experiencing the lack of gravity versus its own body and its possibilities of motion (less) and restraint of movement control. Ideally, the wearable space is constantly (re) shaped by the pressure and movement of the user who while occupying that space and giving it (de) form is also creating real-time images and sounds. During a certain time and in a particular place this body will be an extension of a camera, a microphone and will also be the director of its own film, expanded in a way that he himself is the origin of the ‘narrative’, the beginning and the end of a motion picture. It happens in a present time transcribed as a pause which is not arrival (beginning) neither departure (end). It’s registered as an impression -the movement of the lack of gravity and weightlessness on this body. This pause is an in between, a suspension in (real) time – like a dream.

“Synergy is the effect of linearity that takes up different directions so that multiple connections are established, overthrowing spatial hierarchies and becoming cross-referenced organizational networks [3].”

The synergetic behavior performed by this wearable/body in the absence of gravity will be the combination of consciousness and awareness of the space it occupies while processing live image of its place in space. Like a nomadic space which is based on freedom of movement and choice Zero-G permits the smoothness and resistance to the fixed, the being unstable – and therefore the impossibility to become sedentary.

“When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections.

Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes [4].”

This is a flexible structure which will work as an articulated architecture triggered by the (inter) action of its inhabitant. To this inhabitant (nomadic, affected by constant moving, flowing) it is allowed to carry this object everywhere (permitted by its characteristics – weightless, inflatable, portable, resistant).

Ideally, while shaping it, integrating it, immerging in it he will trigger sound and images (imagining he got home and turned on the TV or Stereo) or just taking shelter (imagining he got home and falls asleep while noise continues ‘outside’). Though he is in control of that noise, sound and image – by modulating them with its spatial occupation and by the intensity of his movements.

This wearable is a space to emerge in Space, in the absence of gravity. I’m inspired by the ephemeral structures and inflatable environments which major impact and expression took place during the sixties and by the utopian work of architects and artists like Archigram, Superstudio and Haus-Rücker-Co. Their search for lightness, organic forms and mobile units while trying to combine a certain counter culture belief with aesthetic novelty (space-age preceding Pop) is simply fascinating -their creation of dream worlds, interpreted as prosthetic extensions and membranes, which outcome was a happening. This all took place before Man first landed on the moon. In this Space Vehicle Earth, as R. Buckminster Füller designated, where we are all astronauts. “What do you mean, ‘astronaut?’ We are all astronauts. Always have been – but really! Never mind your ‘Never-mind-that-space-stuff, let’s be practical, let’s-get-down-to-Earth’ talk [5].”

The Japanese artist Mariko Mori has also been playing and predicting the future of Space Vehicle Earth in a broader sense. For instance, with “Connected World” and “Beginning of the End – Body Capsule” (fig. 3) where she envisions the transcendence of borders to achieve interconnectivity and share one consciousness in this new era, the 21st century, with her tableaux of photo montage and video work, using holograms as real characters in a dream futuristic world. “With the perfection of holographic cinema within the next two decades, we’ll arrive at that point in the evolution of intelligence when the concept of reality no longer will exist. Beyond that the cinema will be one with the live of the mind, and humanity’s communications will become increasingly metaphysical [6].”

Using inflatable material to create a less usual space and construct this wearable also means giving it deflate properties. The real-time audio-visual experience will be possible by using Max/MSP/Jitter which is a software for processing real-time based signals. Flexible LCD screens will be embedded in the inflatable material. Embedded pressure sensors will trigger the process. The ‘electronic’ body will complete the cycle – by connecting and making the machine to work.

Like so, this experience can be taken both in Zero-G and Earth. The results of the cinematic, the performance and the wearable experience though will surely be very different. The spaceship which it is on board is determinant for its envisioned ephemeral moment of life. Though it would still be like a dream. The sensations would most probably be that of flying, floating and mixing emotions during the brief moment of this spacio-temporal occupation. But, either way, will be unlike my recurrent dream – with eyes wide open to prevent the fall.

This project hasn’t been tested or built. It’s a concept for a wearable (performance based) and an idea for my Masters Thesis. The goal is to play and experience it during a Parabolic Flight. The outcome will be the wearable and the performance itself, designed in fig. 4, and the recorded processed real-time audio-visual experience.

[1] K. Oosterhuis, Programmable Architecture, Milano: l’Arca Edizioni, 2002, citation in M. Gausa, V. Guallart, W. Müller,
F. Soriano, F. Porras and J. Morales, The Metapolis Dictionary of Avdvanced Architecture, Actar, p. 342, Barcelona, 2003.

[2] M. L. Palumbo, New Wombs: Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders, p. 71,

[3] M. Gausa, V. Guallart, W. Müller, F. Soriano, F. Porras and J. Morales, The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture, Actar, p. 582, Barcelona, 2003.

[4] G. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1970

[5] G. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1970

[6] G. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1970