Gallery

Design Advisor: Jackilin Hah Bloom
Theory Advisor: Jasmine Benyamin
Sound effects & music obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com

The thesis aims to create a performance of a synthetic sensory experience in the scope of a theatre space. The revealing of the backstage mechanism and its bleeding into the front stage is the key agenda of the performance. It addresses the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, translated as “the total work of art”, where all scopes of perception forms a totality.

A proscenium theatre space is enacted to achieve the agenda above. This initial prototype offers a clear distinction among the backstage, the frontstage and the audience space. At the center of the performance is a machine that metaphorically visualizes the digital simulation process, which acts as the back of house driving mechanism of the performance. As an actor on the stage, the machine generates a turbulence flow of the liquid, vectoring forces for the organic mutations happening in the performance. The limit of time is broken within the scene. Seasonal changes of nature are blended with imprints from man-made artifacts. Architectural elements of the hall are distorted in similar ways, blurring lines among entities, revealing a new spatial and theatrical experience that weaves performance and audience into a holistic environment.

The use of the digital simulation software, Houdini, is the actual back of house process. It could be understood as the breaking and reorganizing of the entity bonds. This chemical reaction obliviates the recognizable forms of entities, interpreting them as pieces of material samples or form attractors. The resulting organic digital form will have an intrinsic material and form relationships with its physical origin. While gaining wide use in the visual effect industry, usually in the process of merging scenes, Houdini offers an opportunity for architects to see the formal relationship between digital assets and physical construction from an informational coded standpoint. It offers an alternative to visualize the information, especially under the current roaming of digital asset collections.

The thesis is a performance of both the ending result, and the process of making. The ending result generated from the Houdini logic of forms blending and evolving is a synthetic sensory experience of both frontstage and backstage, a juxtaposition between soft-edges, natural assets and crisp edges of architectural elements, a conversation between 2D projections and 3D structural elements, a sense of orientation with being above, being fronted, being surrounded.