Bodily Algorithms Workshop

Devised and hosted by Charles Anderson, Tim Schork & Gideon Obarzanek, Bodily Algorithms invited participants to explore space through rule-based systems and interactive modelling. Working from a series of rules and everyday objects, participants created a performance connecting the ordered and the unpredictable.Bodily Algorithms is a work made by Charles Anderson and Tim Schork as part of their on-going collaborative project titled Punto in Aria. This project seeks to explore and test computational design tools, dynamic modeling and generative systems as means through which time based processes and complex systems can be engaged with and responded to. Experimenting with rule based systems, interactive and performative modes of modeling the project generates a range of spatial propositions across scales and design disciplines. A particular focus for this project is a reconsideration of the contemporary city and its space/time of 'performance'. Both theatre buildings and public spaces continue to be constructed in cities around the world but by-and-large they remain passive receptacles for performance, reinforcing officially sanctioned social practices and disciplining the collective body into well behaved citizens that consume culture rather than actively co-create it. This project asks what is the space of performance in the 21st century - an age of media spectacles, social networking media, virtual and 'off-world' existences, fluid technologies and uncontainable prosthetically enhanced bodies? Though design propositions for buildings, civic spaces and 'other' physical and virtual spaces we will perhaps discover 'new strategies for experiencing performance as a more dynamic, creative and communal spatial event.'