3 minutes²

3 minutes², by French art collective Electronic Shadow, expands architectural space of a reduced volume via interartive and enhanced imagery. The space reconfigures itself in response to the individuals activities and over time.

'3 minutes² is an installation mixing space and image, real and virtual and proposes a hybrid habitat metamorphosing endlessly around its inhabitant. Hybridising of space with images, fusion of material with immaterial, architecture of memory and information design, the habitat isn’t only measured by its surface but by the sum of its potential dimensions. Parallel realities melt in one space-time, 3minutes are a space, 10 square meters are a space. 3 minutes² is a surface-time, a hybrid space living according to its inhabitant’s rhythm, his trace, his electronic shadow.

3 minutes² is an installation presenting an extremely reduced living unit. This space has the particularity to extend beyond its physical borders via the image, the space being its projection surface. This volumes demultiplies thus in as many functions as the ones described in the scenario of use of this living space.

In fact, the space permanently reconfigures itself according to its inhabitant’s activities and also defines itself in time. The scenario presents in a few minutes the compression of most activities and functions taking place in the habitat and corresponding to its inhabitant daily life, eating, sleeping, working, etc.

The inhabitant himself is contained in the image, represented as a silhouette. This shadow which represents the projection of a neutral individual in this habitat is the installation’s neuralgic centre, the habitat building itself around him as a cocoon, a more cultural than a natural extension; the habitat becomes then a character.

The presented functions correspond to vital needs and also to more complex behaviours. 3 minutes² doesn’t try to caricaturise the habitat’s functions but to draw the shape of a daily life deeply modified by technologies and the presence of the virtual, or the materialisation of immaterial.

Beyond the traditional functions adapted to this type of habitat, some activities are directly linked to this conception of space and inevitably induce radical changes in the political, economical and social organisation.

The status of the image compared to the space is permanently ambiguous, is it an individual’s printed memory in his habitat, the virtual reflect of a real life or the scale 1 model of a future space, prefigurating the use of technologies in development, such as the nanotechnologies?

3minutes² doesn’t answer to this question but tends to shift the traditional debate opposing real to virtual. Here, hybridation of real and virtual is fictively acquired and becomes the ground for the proposition of a habitat which anticipates the technological and social modifications making it possible.

No screens, no visible interfaces, the two characters touch the walls, make movements, the habitation responds to them. The technology has become totally invisible and the effect of technologic becomes then magic.'

Posted by paul at February 16, 2005 05:17 PM