Chronoscope 1 (2016)
Artist: Future Cities Lab, San Francisco
Venue: Soundwave 7 Bienale (produced by Mediate) at Fort Mason Firehouse, San Francsico, CA
Materials - translucent paper, filament, lead weights, digital projectors, scaffolding, electronics
Chronoscope (/ˈkränəˌskōp/) noun - An instrument for the precise measurement of small time intervals (as by means of a falling sphere, rod, released pendulum, or an electronic device); or for measuring a person's reaction time.
Chronoscope 1 is an immersive theater for seeing, hearing and interacting with a dynamical system accelerating towards a state of disorder. The cloud-like installation is composed of clusters of suspended illuminated planes that serve as portals into a digital world of flowing points, lines and variable forces. As visitors inhabit the space of the gallery, their interactions influence the magnitude and direction of these forces. This ultimately reverses “the arrow of time” - better known as entropy, or the Second law of Thermodynamics. These motions leave dynamic contrails, each with their own unique velocity, trajectory and duration.
The installation exhibited at Fort Mason is a prototype for a larger spatial construction consisting of 16 networked stacked modules. These modules will form an immersive and synthetic “theater-in-the-round” for experimenting with the interplay of the physical and digital worlds. This deployable construction, a cross between a lunar landing module and an underwater observation gallery, will serve as a hub for exploring the complexity of a range of dynamical systems and data visualizations from evolving structures of the internet and social media, to simulations of swarming urban flows, to live footage of biological or weather systems.
Project Credits:
Future Cities Lab: Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno with Jeffrey Maeshiro, Ripon DeLeon, Emily Saunders, Ji Ahn.
Future Cities Lab is an experimental art and design studio, workshop and urban think tank operating globally out of San Francisco, CA. Founding principals Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno have collaborated on a range of award-winning projects exploring the intersections of art and design with advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, responsive building systems and public space. Future Cities Lab is an interdisciplinary studio employing an adventurous team of artists, architects, technologists, digital craftspeople, urban ecologists and more. Johnson and Gattegno are also Associate Professors of Architecture at CCA (California College of Arts, San Francisco).
Fabrication Partner: Machinic Digital Fabrication, Robotics, Consulting, San Francisco.
Software / Hardware: TouchDesigner by Derivative; Rhino / Grasshopper; Kinect V2.
