The Space Interface Project

Expanding the functional imperative of architecture

My professional practice revealed the problem of space-blindness, buildings limited by unimaginative conventions and rigid procurement laws. This led me to create architectural interventions as forms of Brechtian estrangement and Deleuzian refrain. The research expands the functional imperative of architecture. The project constructs a disruptive methodology that establishes a dissonance between the physical and the virtuality of space in which the audience is immersed.

Question and purpose:

How might it be possible to construct a neo-noir experience that alters habitual relationships to architecture? Could new forms of immersion and virtuality become a disruptive agent in this relationship?

Methodological Triangulation:

Drawing upon intermedia disciplines, video, sound and digital performance, my research tests how an altered sense of spatial reality can be achieved. Such perspective shifting, necessitates the synthesis of situated cognition with algorithmic design, and audience’s participation. Within this new field, the research expands architectural experience by engaging interdisciplinary and improvisation methodologies in order to actualize the experience through composites of sensory immersion and audiovisual spatial cues.

Structured event observations:

The outcome staged an immersive virtualized territory incorporating digital video installation, coding, electronic performance, and rapid prototyped structures. In its live enactment, the configurational properties were calibrated to alter the perceived fixity of the gallery space. Through disruptive immersive “instructions” explicit within estranged references, Space Interface inverts architecture from the point of its production to the site of its reception. The events demonstrated a platform capable of extending the audience’s bodily and psychological encounter within the mutability of architecture.

Reflective practice:

Sequential performances with Eberhard Kranemann in Europe, peer and audience feedback participation, book chapter inclusion and grant funds for further development for Space Interface: Disruptive architecture.

Audiovisual Performance with Exhibition

2015 | (3 – 28 September) Space Interface, Weithorn Galerie, Düsseldorf. Live audiovisual performance & exhibition.
Listed in Art Düsseldorf, Art Fair.

2016 (16 March) Space Interface: Signal Transduction (live audiovisual performance), Lichtturm Solingen, Germany. Funded by
Kulturförderung & Dinnebier Licht GmbH.

2016 (2 – 10 September) Space Interface II, (live audiovisual performance and exhibition), KARST Gallery, Plymouth, UK.
Space Interface REDUX, live Immersive Vision Theatre performance.Funded by Arts Council England.

2018 (28 September – 21 October) Space Interface III : The Atlantic Project: After The Future. Plymouth, UK. Curated by Tom
Trevor (project listed within catalogue). Space Interface III was also listed within the Art Weekender (28/29/30th September). Funded by Arts Council England.

Publication (book chapter)

Emmett. M (in press) ‘Multi-Dimensional Architecture’ in Troiani, I. & Ewing, S. (eds) Audio-visual devices: Redefining Architectural
Scholarship through Visual Methodologies,. Intellect Ltd. ISBN 9781789381863
www.intellectbooks.com/visual-research-methods-in-architecture

Dr Mathew Emmett is an experimental architect, artist, composer and academic. His work incorporates hybrid space, site-responsive installation, data-generated sound and emerging technologies.

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