D151ORTION Pavillion at Distortion Festival 2010

Dato:

01.06.10

A transatlantic collaboration between architecture students from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has produced an innovative installation for the most progressive summer music festival in Denmark. 

The Project Distortion installation is the centerpiece of the Distortion Music festival in Copenhagen, taking place 2.-6.June 2010.  

Splashing curious fragments of light onto the ground and its surroundings, the mobile installation will visit four music venues during the festival taking center stage outdoors, in a small nightclub, on the street and in a crowded lobby. During the all-night parties, visitors can inhabit the structure that reveals a kaleidoscopic golden surface reflecting movement, light, sound and colour. 

The digitally fabricated, reconfigurable, acoustic pavilion is made up of over 151 individually tuned sound and light cones cut from acoustic absorbing material. Focusing on acoustic and visual performance and its interaction with the inhabitant—recombinatory geometries, parametric design strategies and physics-based simulation techniques give architectural expression to the Dionysian experience of the Distortion Music Festival.

Like the multiple urban sites occupied by the festival, Project Distortion exists in a binary state of material and experiential expression, its internal contradictions challenging our ideas of space and social interaction. It simultaneously evokes notions of movement and repose, a sense of being proximate and isolated, of watching and being watched. Playing on this series of oppositions through tactility, light, and sound—it layers intimacy with exposure, dark with light, noise with quiet and amplifies the extremes of each as one’s orientation to the installation shifts. Aggregations of the soft cones form dark nooks of dampened sound that open up to a vault of fractal reflections of exploding color and music from the festival. 

The design development took place as a collaboration between researchers, teachers and students. The students were either in pursuit of their professional degrees, as a part of specialized master’s programmes in acoustic and lighting design, or alongside their ph.d. thesis.  Design explorations and presentations results were tracked and shared through a host of contemporary media platforms throughout the four month development phase which culminated in the conjoint realization of the final installation. 

Project Distortion will be exhibited during the Copenhagen Distortion Festival at Pumpehuset (Wednesday June 2^nd), Korsgadehallen (Thursday 3rd June), Enghave Plads (Friday 4^th June), Carlsberg (Saturday 5^th June). 

Collaborators in the project are The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture Study Department 8 and the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) from Copenhagen and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture from New York. 

The project is sponsored by Kunstfonden, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Akustikmiljö of Sweden. 

Contact: Martin Tamke,CITA martin.tamke@karch.dk or Niels Jakubiak Andersen, Afdeling8 niels.andersen@karch.dk