Nikolaos Chandolias

Project: ACATUS

Funded by Hexagram

Concept: Omar AL FALEH &Nikolaos Chandolias
Support: Marcello Licitra

ACATUS, the Greek word for the mythological “floating vessel”, is a modular suspended interactive light structure that is responsive to people’s presence and action. When looked at from above, ACATUS is a rigid grid of equal squares, which is the traditional reductionist divisive systems that describe space and place in traditional architectural drawings. However, ACATUS’ grid vertices are vertically displaced to transform the perspective of those who walk under it into a varying geometrical landscape that does not obstruct vision yet influences their behavior and trajectory in space.
This formal geometrical deformation is a reminiscence of the early experimentation in deconstructive architecture where systems (semiotic, symbolic, and representational) are iteratively transformed and complexified. The resulting shapes are a snapshot of this transformation that holds evidence of its origins and futures, thus adding a temporal dimension to the genesis of ACATUS as dynamic responsive architecture that exists across the four dimensions.

ACATUS is designed to respond to different modalities of interaction: presence, motion, and sound levels. The response is rendered on the node level rather than lines, which is a symbolic reference to constellations and star mapping, which was the original path-finding and geo-mapping system, before digital systems were invented.
ACATUS exists on various states that are presence-dependent. When no one is present in the installation, ACATUS cycles between different pre-determined animated behaviors. When presence is detected, response happens on the sonic level and on the motion tracking levels, and rendering the response is responsive to the accumulated input of the multiple users within the space.

Project: Semantic Shift

The video below demonstrates a new idea that derived from the storytelling space (storytelling space.weebly.com) and has to do with how we can use transcribed utterances, natural language processing techniques and semantic clusters to re-think the way we perceive and interact with text. Every time a movement is detected (like swapping or changing-page movement) the text re-iterates itself and is recomposed in the same syntactical structure with words that derive from the initial semantic analysis.

The system could apply transformations in different parts of speech (PoS), ex. just verbs, adverbs, nouns etc. creating infinite possibilities of semantical transformations, depending on each individuals movement intensity and the designers choices. This is a demo screen capture of the system. I want to realise this project as an installation where the text is projected on a piece of paper, and each time someone approaches or interacts somehow with the paper a new semantic aspect of the text appears. Like in the example the “This is perfect and stable.” text becomes “this find just right and abiding.”. (If we have chosen just adverbs to be analysed the result would be “this is just right and abiding.”)