arc605/607
Upper Level Graduate Studio
Fall 2005
Instructor: Omar Khan
Dept. of Architecture
SUNY Buffalo

With Moore's law sounding the beat of technological innovation, theoretical models of artificial self-organizing systems no longer seem the stuff of science fiction. The cybernetic vision of artificial nervous systems that would allow our environments to communicate with us has moved closer to reality. Key to this shift has been the development of cheap, ubiquitous, high-performance sensors. As these technologies become increasingly small their presence in our environment will relocate our egocentric sensory perception to the space that surrounds us. The locus of our senses will no longer be singular but distributed and manifold.
This studio will develop architectural proposals that occur in the overlapping boundaries of information systems and material space. We will challenge the existing surveillance mentality of machine vision systems to postulate what the nature of sensing for architecture might be. We will work through 3 conceptual frameworks- organization, interaction and response- to develop working models of architecture/information interfaces.