Tuesday, November 18th 7-10 pm,

At the Launchpad on the corner of 3rd and state street, Troy, NY

www.rpi.edu/dept/arch/space

Collaborators
Amanda Ramos
Antonio Muntadas
Brian Lonsway
Chung Kyu Kim
Collier Hyams
Dustin Brady
Eric Johnson
Kathleen Brandt
Lee Miller
Mike Zaleski
Nathan Lavertue
Neil Pelone

The hybrid spaces installation is an attempt to explore, in spatial terms, the presentation of a web site devoted to the understanding of hybrid spaces, architectural conditions, which represent combined programs, spatiality, and media. On the web, the user creates a database search by fluidly combining image fragments of different types of spaces. The results of this search are then displayed as a combination of images, sounds, texts, and movies, which represent the actual conditions where such hybrid combinations occur. In this way, it is intended both as a research database for investigation conditions of hybrid form and as a playful means of configuring and composing hybrid conditions.

When the visitors make choices from the projected images by "locking" certain images in place, combined sounds from the places represented in the images are filtered through the site of the installation as an abandoned department store turned into a dance club and transformed into a new acoustic space on the dance floor. This filtering exposes the sounds (taken from airports, casinos, churches, and malls) to the sounds of shopping and the spaces represented in the images. This acoustic environment is coupled with video feeds from the points where the filtering is occurring so that the main site of the installation contains both acoustic and visual representations of all of the spaces, which create the hybrid.

This piece is to be seen as an experiment in the transference of web and multimedia interaction into spatial inhabitation. The subject adds both an imperative and a complexity to the experiment, in that it provides a strong motivation to move beyond the simple interaction possible with a web site and that it provides a problematic recursion of spatial conditions (the web site, about hybrid spaces, is transformed into a hybrid web space/physical space which in turn is about creating hybrid space). Our desire in the installation is not so much to resolve these complexities, but expose them in a way that allows us and the visitors to understand more about them, and to encourage a discussion of these conditions, the conditions of hybrid space.