CODE: 038
ARCHITECTS: AMID [cero9] Cristina Díaz Moreno + Efrén García Grinda.
ALIAS: I,M
YEAR: 2005
PROJECT: MEIAC Extension. New Media and Digital Art Gallery.
LOCATION: Badajoz (Spain)
COLLABORATORS: a! (Luis Cabrejas Guijarro + Hsiao Tien Hung), Jorge Saz Semolino.
I’M IS NOT A SPACE. IT IS A POINT OF INTERCHANGE
I’M IS NOT A SPACE. IT IS AN INFORMATION TANK
I’M IS NEITHER NATURAL NOR ARTIFICIAL. IT EXACERBATES HYPERARTIFICIALITY
I’M IS A PLACE FOR SOCIALIZATION, BUT IS NOT A PUBLIC SPACE
I’M CANNOT BE CROSSED. YOU MAY ENTER BUT THE EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE SPACE
ONLY THE INTERACTION WITH THE STORED DATA
I’M IS NOT A BUILDING. IT IS A SPATIAL PERTURBATION THAT GENERATES DISTURBANCES
IN THE DATA SYSTEM
I’M IS A PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL DOOR OF LARGE, MEDIUM AND SMALL SCALE
I’M IS A JOYSTICK, A C.P.U. AND A BUILDING ALL TOGETHER
WHEN YOU ENTER I’M A SKIN PATCH IS STUCK ON YOUR SKIN: A PHYSICAL, DIGITAL AND
PHYSIOLOGICAL POINT OF CONNECTION AND INTERACTION WITH I’M
IN I’M NONE OF THE PHYSICAL INTERFACES HAS MATERIAL VALUE. EVERYTHING IS
DISPOSABLE AS OBJECT
I’M IS A COMFORTABLE SPACE: EVERYTHING IS LIKE A BED
I’M INDUCES AN EXTREMELY PASSIVE PHYSICAL ATTITUDE FOR THE BODY BUT IT IS
EXTREMELY CHALLENGING TO THE INTELLECT
I’M EMPHASIZES THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND THE
INFORMATION REALM
INTERNALLY, I’M IS A PHYSICAL BLACK BODY AND A DATA WHITE BODY
EXTERNALLY, I’M IS A PHYSICAL WHITE BODY AND A DATA BLACK BODY
I’M HAS NO APPEARANCE: IT IS ONLY AN ANTENNA
The interaction with digital art challenges the commonly held concepts of art museum, exhibition and curating. Its perception and storage demands very little physical space. Using a broad spectrum of media —screens, projections, physical objects, sounds— the place it is stored in is a combination darkroom, screen, traditional gallery and hard disk. The way of organizing its perception and entering into contact with it questions the form in which we interact with the artwork, how this is shown and even how it is generated. In other words, at what point do which agents intervene in its realization. Quite simply, this implies that no physical space is needed to produce or to store this kind of art; not even to perceive it.
The Immaterial Museum was to be a small gallery to house the digital art collection, servers and new technology workshops of the MEIAC, the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, and at the same time to be a key element in the reconquest by the public of the gardens and rooms of the MEIAC, which occupies part of an old prison constructed in the form of a central panopticon and radial galleries.
In order to overcome the dilemma of defining a space whose characteristic are diffuse and difficult to concretize, a space of which no meaningful examples exist, the first action consisted essentially of drawing up a list of conditions; a text as starting point for the project, a kind of manifesto that defined in affirmatives and negatives the nature of the I,M, the modes of perceiving the works, the way of modifying the surrounding space, the form of using it and the nature of its space.
This spatial Rule Set was accomplished by combining two interlinked rings: an underground space laid out around an excavation that houses the servers and the workshops and provides the connection with the existing building, and a distorted tube, bent back on itself, situated in equilibrium a few metres above the ground level of the garden, which houses the exhibition room of the museum. This is a monohull steel construction pipe that performs structurally as a solid supported at four points and cut across by the gallery with the viewing screens, converting the museum into an infinite spatial loop. This double-ring configuration defines a space whose length and development it is impossible to perceive, a kind of mechanism of dislocation and loss of spatial references, with which to make compatible a precise spatial definition and the non-interference of this in the perception of the works, making it possible to show the visitor different works at every step, expanding the size of the museum itinerary indefinitely.
The raised ring-shaped room is basically a volume with a black interior. The spatial experience consists in moving through it, experiencing the ascending and descending ramps of the floor and the changing closeness and distance of the works at each point. The visual experience is reduced to a variable lighting system that travels slowly round the ring fourteen times during opening hours, and a series of three openings in the hull, each one oriented toward an external visual focus (a patch of lawn, the sky and the system of reflections in the interior patio). The few traces of their visual appearance are converted into a luminous and material navigation system in the interior of the gallery.
On entering this space the visitors are invited to put on a device connecting them with the museum and its server: a small medical patch with a radio antenna that serves to exchange small packages of data with the server and let the system knows each visitor’s position in the room. When connected to a personal peripheral —telephone, organizer or music player— the museum information is activated in step with the visitor’s movements and interaction with the work: a digital and physiological doorway into the museum. In addition, the gallery is the centre of a wireless network system that provides connection to the central server from any part of the garden and activates this fragment of public space, traditionally isolated from the city.
The interior space is defined by radiant cooling and heating systems connected to a system of collectors and a vertical well that acts as a heat accumulator, and complementary systems of artificial climate creation, directional sound and RFID and Wi-Fi antennae. The space is thus defined not so much by its visual conditions but by the interaction with other media and by its heterogeneous and variable climatic conditions: a new kind of stage house at a reduced scale, climatic rather than visual, in contrast to the conventional white room of the exhibition gallery and the black box of a theatre performance.
The museum is clad with a reflecting surface on the exterior so that its image effectively disappears. The structural hull itself, treated and polished, reflects its surroundings, while the complexity of its surface deforms that image. Like the inverse of an anamorphic visual construction, the supposedly real image of the surroundings becomes the distorted construction that, projected onto its surface, makes the visual appearance of the I,M possible.
Rather than a building, the Immaterial Museum is a disturbance, a map of the visual, climatic and digital displacement of the museum garden that acts by spatially defining a domain for human interaction with digital art.
