020716 – Environs 2 – London

Philip Beesley is working in cross discipline collaborations is allowing designers the possibilities to explore new frontiers. Architecture, visual arts, fashion, engineering, systems software and synthetic biology are the resources being drawn upon. Structures incorporate sensors that provide sensory feedback and interactivity. Responses may be acoustic, light emitting, kinetic or chemical.

Here are the early beginnings of a living architecture, a diffusive form, heavily reticulated, a cloud of materials, a misty nebular periphery. The structures breathe like a giant lung, they are permeable, porous, fragile boundaries that absorb and radiate energies and information. There is a lack of ‘Vitruvian solidity’ with its defensive enclosure of inside and outside, us and them. Here the artist strives for an interconnected oneness. These porous fields are the opposite of the machines that minimise their interaction with the world, the space ship, the submarine, the office. There is an ‘excess of fragility’, the greatest accessibility and vulnerability. Pursued is the idea that we might have expanded physiologies that acutely feel the presence of the energies that surround us so that we may in turn be aware of our symbiotic relationship with our locality and our planet. The work is described as a pluripotent soil or turf, a surface that has positive fertility and has the ability to give back more than it consumes. These Gaia like ideas are followed with religious zeal. 

The boundaries are constructed in layers or rather interwoven networks of 3D textiles. A chemical inner layer of organic batteries in latex sheaves that produce energies. Protocells, in test tubes and vials, that extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn them into a carbonate shell. A reactive outer layer covered in a network of motorised fronds, filters and whiskers that translates the environment and responds with exaggerated resonance. Sandwiched between these is a network of receivers, low energy and bimetallic mechanisms working in a mutual relationship with many sensory boundaries.

This work has its roots in the early conceptual projects of the 1960’s (See text environs 1) and has been simmering and developing steadily in university projects over the last seventy years. The process has been slow and accumulative, now new accessible technologies are beginning to realise workable prototypes. 

This work forces man to look forever closer at the natural circular systems he inhabits. To understand the efficiencies of complimentary symbiotic arrangements, minimum energy usage and zero waste. It openly pursues and organic florid beauty in the aesthetic of nature as it interprets and replicates natural systems. There is an inherent optimism within this penumbra of surface of a new definition of robot that is the gentle articulated aurora and not the all-dominating mechanical man of so many Sci-Fi films. 

The Surrogate Twin