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At the core of Design for Performance & Interaction is the belief that the creation of spaces for performance, and the creation of performances within them, are symbiotic activities.
The programme questions conventional understandings of architecture and of disciplinarity and collaboration. Architecture is seen here as inherently dynamic, decisively interactive and performative, and as transdisciplinary.
The course challenges rigid conventions in considering the role of interaction and the interactive, questioning what constitutes architectural ensembles and how we might reform the presentation and format of performative events. To this end the programme expands the field of performance and interaction and understands space, objects and human and non-human inhabitants as potential performers. Student work, always considered in four dimensions, encompasses questions of behaviour, duration and changing environments to continuously reinvent the role of
the architect. This makes architecture itself an active and interactive performer. Students can engage with often diametrically opposed fields of enquiry and methods, to achieve deeper understandings of relevant questions and create profound experiential designs.
A central theme of the programme is ‘radical embodiment’. Radical embodiment broadens traditional understandings of embodiment to include the embedded, enacted, extended and affective. Student work, directly and indirectly, embraces this understanding and is further influenced by a deep appreciation of concepts and practices such as cybernetics, systems theories, cognitive science, feminist studies, as well as performance studies and choreography.
This year students are presenting interactive installations, experimental soft robotics and kinetic sculptures, eXtended reality (XR) environments, performance pieces, wearable technologies, sound art, spatial games and speculative design inquiries. The performances and interactive artefacts that have emerged are as radical as they are critical, exploring ideas ranging from feminist studies to equity, diversity and inclusion, as well as ethics in contemporary technoculture, to the impact of robotics and AI on behaviour of and in the built environment, to the ever-increasing importance of critical design across the reality-virtuality continuum.
An important feature of the programme is exploring work by others at exhibitions and festivals and testing students’ work in public settings. In March, the programme travelled to Austria to explore Vienna’s contemporary art and architecture scene, spend time meditating in a Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Alps, and enjoy Salzburg’s cultural landscape. In June, students collaborated with Design for Manufacture and Bio-Integrated Design for ‘Bartlett Transitions’, hosted as part of the London Festival of Architecture. In September, projects were exhibited at the Ars Electronica festival – the largest and most prestigious new media art festival in the world.