This summer, visitors to Sao Paulo’s Itau Cultural Gallery find themselves face-to-face with a host of artificial life forms. Amongst them is a new version of artist Ruairi Glynn’s interactive installation ‘Fearful Symmetry’, which was first shown at the Tate Modern, London, in 2012.

Interactive Architecture Lab founder Ruairi Glynn chats with CAN about the freshly-launched Design for Performance & Interaction (DfPI) programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Created at the Bartlett School of Architecture / Interactive Architecture, Palimpsest uses 3D scanning and virtual reality to record urban spaces and the communities that live in them. The project aims to question/test the implication if the past, present, and future city could exist in the same place, layering personal stories and local histories of the city at a 1:1 scale.

Created by Danilo Sampaio and William Victor Camilleri at the The Interactive Architecture Lab at UCL/London, Hortum Machina, B is a half garden, half machine, cybernetic lifeform that explores new forms of bio-cooperative interaction between people and nature, within the built environment.

Contact is an acoustic research project that turns any hard surface into an interface. The installation uses contact microphones, passive sonar and waveform analysis to recognise information of touches, ie where a surface has been hit or how a hand has made contact.