Projection-Animation

This course will focus on the ways in which designers and artists can help to enliven both existing and future monuments and facades for the living – to be relevant, meaningful and critically useful in the ever-changing present.

Projection-Animation may be seen as one of the ways in which the architecture of buildings and monuments can combine their own permanence with change through media armament for creative public inspiration, responsiveness and interactivity.

In the context of rapid urban transformation, the blank facades of lofty civic edifices and the blind eyes of silent public monuments face the speechless and estranged residents living in their shadow – often on their steps and under their feet. In such cases both the city\’s monuments and the city\’s residents seem to need animation, even re-animation; existentially, culturally and politically.

In this way, the art of animating facades and monuments may be based on re-actualizing and critically mobilizing symbolic spatial structures that we live among while creating conditions for the animation of ourselves and others as existential, political subjects and public “projectors.”

In search for an innovative contribution to these tasks, the course participants may consider adapting, inventing and developing various kinds of equipment and interfaces; proposing and developing architectural video, sonic projections and new architectural designs that integrate media animation; and testing façade mapping projects combined (when desired) with performative participatory actions and events.

The course will focus primarily on the development of artistic and design-centered projection-animation projects. This practical work will be supplemented and supported by selected readings, discussions and reviews, as well as responses and input from guest consultants and critics.
Media experiments and artistic interventions engaging existing or proposed buildings, facades, statues and monuments will be a critical part of the course.