[wOw, WithOut Walls Plymouth Arts Centre. 5-June – 11 July 1999]

[extracted from the old HTML site]

CONTEXT:

“We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection points of the physical and virtual worlds, of occupation and interaction through telepresence as well as through the telecommunication-induced fragmentation and recombination of traditional architectural types, and of new, soft cities that parallel, complement, and sometimes compete with our existing urban concentrations of brick, concrete and steel.”
(Mitchell)

Inspired by Plymouth Arts Center’s lottery proposal for a new ‘wired’ Arts and Architecture centre, wOw is an adventurous exploration of the future of such cultural spaces / places, and the cities that sustain them. The lottery bid envisions a building that integrates new media technologies into the fabric of its structure, and anticipates a fusion of creative cultural activity into the information matrix of the city. Whilst Plymouth is being rewired for the digital information age, the future of its Arts and Architecture is being modelled within the wOw exhibition. wOw, by exploring everyday human interaction with the built and information environments, also examines the role of architecture and the arts within the city of the future. The integration of digital interactive multimedia with architecture challenges both forms and suggests a new field of practice: the ‘Architecture of Cyberspace’.

“The phenomena of virtuality and interaction may be regarded as part of a new material world. They act in parallel to the physical world as we know it so far, as an “extension” of the physical world, as an “artificially extended habitat” whose processes, however, are not independent of the physical aspects of the places and the biology of the living bodies.”
(Manzini)

SYMPOSIUM:

wOw Symposium: Saturday 19 June 2.pm

The WithOut Walls Symposium will be held on Saturday 19 June 2.pm in the Plymouth Arts Centre Cinema.

The guest speakers are:

Alex de Rijke –
dR MM. [De Rijke Marsh Morgan]

Professor Roy Ascott –
CAiiA-STAR, UWCN/UoP.

Professor Adrian Gale –
The School of Architecture and the Building Arts.

Dirk Hansen –
School of Architecture, UoP.

Mike Phillips –
CAiiA-STAR, UoP.

The Symposium will extend the exhibition and explore issues such as urban regeneration, public art, Micro Architecture, cyber architecture and transient structures.

PROJECTS:

Exhibitors:
Kate Bryant – Geoff Cox – Carlos Fadon – Tania Fraga – Dirk Hansen – Dan Livingstone – James Norwood – Mark Pearson – Mike Phillips – Steve Smith – Chris Speed.

Students:
Architecture BA – BSc MediaLab Arts