Beyond The Pale Ghosts In The Machine
Aarhus, Denmark
2018
Exploring how digital registration technology can be used to capture and translate the intangible and ephemeral aspects of architectural experience, Beyond The Pale Ghosts In The Machine used photogrammetry to record a typical visitor’s path through a school cafeteria. This research expanded upon previously explored themes and digital tools by increasing the size of the space registered, incorporating physical movement and activities, and purposely documenting the area in a non-standard sequence determined by a space-specific typical experience. Resulting processing inevitably produced a broad array of object misregistrations, creating a digital version filled with blurry correlations, undulating cloud fragments, and ghostly mirages of mislocated bodies.
The digital version of the cafeteria was analyzed further through an architectural design lens and specific regions were identified and isolated as potential areas for the design and construction of an architectural intervention. One isolated region was closely examined and used to extract a series of metal folding instructions to be further developed at full scale using sheet metal and a robot. Experiments translating the “folds” within the point cloud region to shaping metal were used to delve deeper into extracting and developing physical effects or phenomena such as distortion, rippling, extremes in depth, visual ooze, and ambiguous boundaries.  

Ultimately the driving ambition for this research was to further develop an architectural process that reveals how digital phenomena (as perceived and curated by the architect) can be physically produced, and consequently how these physical artifacts further transform perception and experience of an existing physical space. 

This project has been featured HERE.