fabric | rblg

Note: the new project Atomized/Retroffited Functioning by fabric | ch has been selected for La Biennale di Venezia / 19th International Architecture Exhibition (2025), curated by C. Ratti.

The piece is currently on display in the Corderie (main exhibition space of the Arsenale, Venice) and will stay exhibited until the 23rd of November 2025 (10.05 – 23.11.2025).

The project present a live iteration of the ongoing Atomized (*) series of work, at this occasion within a fictional space that gather dynamic planetary conditions, in the form of environmental data coming from meteo stations across the globe.

This is a series of radical algorithmic experiments that fabric | ch discreetly initiated in 2014 with a publication—Desierto #3, 28°C—, and an experimental project—Reponsive Atmospheric Patios—on “spatial and environmental intelligence”: real-time environmental data feeds into the automated and continuous assembly of previously “atomized” elements of architectural functions (as well as a diverse set of “atoms” of use/misuse/non-use of space). The results help us to study renewed and evolving assemblies for our changing planet.

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The whole project, its genealogy, and the current live feed are presented on https://www.fabric.ch/Atomized/

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By fabric | ch

The "Pulsar Map" (Peirce quincuncial projection), or live environmental data coming from the selected planetary and historical setllements locations: Venice (IT), Athens (GR), Uruk (IR), Tokyo (JP), Vancouver (CA), Chicago (US), Manchester (EN), Brasilia (BR), North Pole (-). These live data help us build a fictional and planetary live space, to be investigated by Atomized/Retrofitted Functioning. 

Atomized/Retrofitted Functioning

Loosely inspired by particle physics experiments, where collisions reveal fundamental forces, the project explores new spatial paradigms by rethinking past functional assemblies. It parallels retrofitting, adapting spatial configurations to evolving climates and digital realities rather than following fixed models.

Drawing at the same time on vernacular architecture, which historically responded to local climates through material intelligence (notably the work of Professors F. Aubry at EPFL, and B. Rodofsky at Cooper Union, as well as Philippe Rahm’s contemporary interpretation), the project extends this logic into computational realms. It examines the patterns and phasing effects of contemporary space between material and non-material milieux.

The project takes form as an abstract and speculative habitable volume, where environmental data from key locations in human habitation evolution generate shifting conditions—day and night, hot and cold, urban and desert—coexisting in one space. This approach enables simulations of future climatic conditions, while using real-time data from 2025 during the Venice Biennale.

Presented as a video screencast of an application running live on a server in fabric | ch's studio, driven by machine learning, the project autonomously generates spatial scenarios that stabilize twice a day. These can be downloaded in parallel as an immersive, walkable AR/VR experience.

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Then, tendencies can be drawn: what is the average presence of a certain type of content (functional, non-functional) over 3 or 6 months (from May to November 2025), for instance, or also only during Venetian nights? During Spring or Summer, etc.? Incoming climate behaviour could also be extrapolated from scientific forecasts: what will the climate be like in 2050? And in 2100? Or conversely, what was it like in 1972, for instance (the year The Limits to Growth was published, which was a clear first warning—even if imperfect—of what was to come if “growth” remained unchecked)?

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And then, from a haze of potential space use, and non-use, opened and closed volumes can be drawn. None of them being entirely suitable, frozen shapes framing freely evolving conditions. 

Images from the project Responsive Atmospheric Patios – extended experiments (fabric | ch, 2016).

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Atomized/Retrofitted Functioning is presented in a standardized way by the curatorial team, with the screencast video of the application running on the servers of fabric | ch. It is installed in the Artificiale section of the Biennale, next to the iconic–and somehow problematic–Seek project (1969–1070), by Nicolas Negroponte and Leon Groisser at the MIT Architecture Machine Group. Next to Architecture as a Living System, by John and Julia Frazer—as part of Cedric Price's Generator project (1976–79), but also of more contemporary (post-)critical takes on "computing" and "cybernetics" through the work of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (Calculating Empires, 2022), and others.

Atomized/Retrofitted Functioning in the Corderie building, at Biennale Architettura 2025.19th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice 10.05 – 23.11.2025.

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The project can also be "followed" during the Biennale, at this address: https://www.fabric.ch/Atomized/ , in live streaming during Biennale opening hours.

The whole genealogy of the research and its previous iterations are also accessible at the same location.

Note: fabric | ch has been selected to be part of the next Venice Biennial of Architecture 2025, starting in May '25.

While we cannot display much of the project engaged for now, these (below) are preliminary studies for what was planned first as a large media/data arrchitecture installation, inspired by previous works (notably Atomized Functioning). It will likely become a more standard presentation of the project driven by the curator's team, in the "Artificiale Canon" part of the exhibition.

Nonetheless, fabric | ch will take part in the Biennale Architettura 2025, alos known as the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

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By fabric | ch

Atomited/Retrofitted Functiong (early draft as large media/data architecture installation, 2025)

 Atomized Functioning & Atmospheric Patios extended study (2018, 2016)

By fabric | ch

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As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 09.2023), via all its tags!

FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:

(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)

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Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we've never made any money or advertised on this site).

Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).

Note: Patrick Keller (fabric | ch) was in discussion with curator Sabine Himmelsbach, from Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel (CH), about their new acquisition for the collection of the Museum: Satellite Daylight 47°33'N.

The piece will be displayed permanently in the public space of the HeK. At least until breakdown... But interestingly, it is also part of a whole program of digital conservation at HeK that should prevent its technological collapse, for which we had to follow a tight protocol of documentation and provide the source code pf the work.

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fabric | ch, Satellite Daylight, 47°33‘N, 2020, Vue de l'installation durant «Shaping the Invisible World», 2021, HeK. Photo.: P. Keller.

Shooting set in preparation ...

Followed by our discussion with Sabine Himmelsbach ... (with a lot of reverb in the staircase!)

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Via Haus der elektronischen Künste (blog)

Patrick Keller of fabric | ch, a studio for architecture, interaction and research in Lausanne, provides thrilling insight about the new work installed in the staircase of HeK.

Patrick Keller of fabric | ch, a studio for architecture, interaction and research in Lausanne, provides information about the new work in an interview. The installation  Satellite Daylight, 47°33’N, commissioned for the HeK collection, simulates the light registered by an imaginary meteorological satellite orbiting the earth at the latitude of Basel at a speed of 7541m/s.

Note: fabric | ch was part of the exhibition Shaping the Invisible World, in the middle of the world pandemic (03.03 - 23.05.21).

A new creation, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N was exhibited at this occasion (img. below), which was also acquiredby HeK and enters it's collection at the same time.

Among others, the exhibition displays works by Tega Brain, Bengt Sjölén & Julian Oliver, Bureau d'études, James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Quadrature, etc. and was curated by Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz.

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Via Haus der eletronischen Künste

The exhibition «Shaping the Invisible World – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge» examines, through cartography, the representational forms of the map as a tool between knowledge and technology. The works of the artists on view negotiate the meaning of the map as a gauge of our digital, technological and global society.

(Photo.: fabric | ch)

(Photo.: T. Marti)

fabric | ch, Satellite Daylight 47°33'N (2021) at the Haus der elektronischen Künste (photo.: fabric | ch).

Cartography – the science of surveying and representing the world – developed in antiquity and provided the springboard for communication and economic exchange between people and cultures around the globe. At the same time, maps are undeniably never neutral, since their creation inherently involves interpretation and imagination. Today, it is IT companies that drive progress in the field and drastically influence our views of the world and how we communicate, navigate and consume globally. While map production has become more democratic, digital maps are nevertheless increasingly used for political and economic manipulation. Questions of privacy, authorship, economic interests and big data management are more poignant than ever before and closely intertwined with contemporary cartographic practices.
Today’s maps not only depict, but also document, negotiate and visualize subjective views of the world. But are these maps more democratic? Who benefits from self-determined productions and what consequences do they lead to?

The strategies in digital mapping and cartography employed by the artists presented in Shaping the Invisible World  – Digital Cartography as an Instrument of Knowledge are subversive. Their spectacular panoramas and virtual scenarios reveal how the digital technologies culturally affect our understanding of the world.

Navigating between subversive cartography and digital mapping, the exhibition puts the spotlight on the fascination of maps in relation to the democratization of knowledge and appropriation. By uncovering hidden realities, scarcely visible developments and possible new social relationships within a territory, the artists delineate the evolution of invisible worlds.

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Artists: Studio Above&Below, Tega Brain & Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, James Bridle, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Bureau d'études/ Collectif Planète Laboratoire, fabric | ch, Fei Jun, Total Refusal (Robin Klengel & Leonhard Müllner), Trevor Paglen, Esther Polak & Ivar Van Bekkum, Quadrature, Jakob Kudsk Steensen

Curators: Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz

     (View the pictures of the exhibition directly on HeK's website).

Note: during the long shutdown of the museums in Switzerland last Spring, fabric | ch has nevertheless the chance to see Public Platform of Future Past (pdf), one of its latest architectural investigations, integrated into the permanent collection of the Haus der elektronischen Künste (HeK), in Basel.

We are pleased that our work is recognized by innovative and risk taking curators (Sabine Himmelsbach, Boris Magrini), and become part of the museum's collection, along several others works (by Jodi, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Olia Lialina, Christina Kubisch, Zimoun, etc.)

It is also the first of our work whose certificate of authenticity has been issued by a blockchain! (datadroppers)

A second work - currently in production - will enter the collection in the spring of 2021, which will be documented at that time.

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Via Haus der elektronischen Künste 

By Sabine Himmelsbach

HeK Sammlung - Sabine Himmelsbach über fabric | ch from HeK on Vimeo.

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The video work is composed of four distinct videos, each showing a distinct but static view into a timelapse of the pavilion and its evolving light.

All four video must be displayed simultaneously by following minimal instructions.

Note: 2017 was very busy (the reason why I wasn't able to post much on | rblg...), and the start of 2018 happens to be the same. Fortunately and unfortunatly!

I hope things will calm down a bit next Spring, but in the meantime, we're setting up an exhibition with fabric | ch. A selection of works retracing 20 years of activities, which purpose will be also to serve in the perspective of a photo shooting for a forthcoming book.

The event will take place in a disuse factory (yet a historical monument from the 2nd industrial era), near Lausanne.

If you are around, do not hesitate to knock at the door!

By fabric | ch

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Environmental Devices · Projets & expérimentations (1997-2017)

Image: Daniela & Tonatiuh.

During a few days, in the context of the preparation of a book, a selection of works retracing 20 years of activities of fabric | ch will be on display in a disused factory close to Lausanne.
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Information: http://www.fabric.ch/xx/
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Opening on February 9, 5.00-11.00pm
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Visiting hours:
Saturday - Sunday 10-11.02, 4.00-8.00pm
Wednesday 14.02, 5.00-8.00pm
Friday-Saturday 16-17.02, 5.00-8.00pm.
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Or by appointment: 021.3511021
Guided tours at 6.00pm

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Pendant quelques jours et dans le contexte de la création d'un livre monographique, accrochage d'une sélection de travaux retraçant 20 ans d'activités de fabric | ch.
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Informations: http://www.fabric.ch/xx
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Vernissage le 9 février, 17h-23h
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Heures de visite:
Samedi - dimanche 10-11.02, 16h-20h
Mercredi 14.02, 17h-20h
Vendredi-samedi 16-17.02, 17h-20h00
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Ou sur rendez-vous: 021.3511021
Visites commentées à 18h.

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Event on Facebook.

Note: Timothy Morton introducing his concept of "hyperobjects" and "object-oriented philosophy".

Via e-flux via The Guardian (June 17)

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Image of Thimothy Morton.

The Guardian has a longread on the US-based British philosopher Timothy Morton, whose work combines object-oriented ontology and ecological concerns. The author of the piece, Alex Blasdel, discusses how Morton's ideas have spread far and wide—from the Serpentine Gallery to Newsweek magazine—and how his seemingly bleak outlook has a silver lining. Here's an excerpt:

Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians” – as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.

Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). “Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out” by this epiphany, he says. But there’s another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. “Oh, my God!” Morton exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. “My attempt to escape the web of fate was the web of fate.”

The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.

It is through hyperobjects that we initially confront the Anthropocene, Morton argues. One of his most influential books, itself titled Hyperobjects, examines the experience of being caught up in – indeed, being an intimate part of – these entities, which are too big to wrap our heads around, and far too big to control. We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them means that we can never fully know them. Because of such phenomena, we are living in a time of quite literally unthinkable change.

Related Links:

Note: some early optic art from 1802? 

The visual optics plates were realized by scientist Thomas Young at that time, when he was studying light (wave theory of light). It took another 100 (and fifty) years to truly access the art world... 

My question would be: what kind of "plates" are getting drawn today? (and this drives us to Leonardo, to art-sciences programs of different sorts, etc.)

Via Wikipedia

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"(...). Nevertheless, in the early-19th century Young put forth a number of theoretical reasons supporting the wave theory of light, and he developed two enduring demonstrations to support this viewpoint.

With the ripple tank he demonstrated the idea of interference in the context of water waves. With the Young's interference experiment, or double-slit experiment, he demonstrated interference in the context of light as a wave. (...)"

Note: an amazing climatic device.

For clean energy experimentation here. Would have loved to have that kind of devices (and budget ;)) when we put in place Perpetual Tropical Sunshine !

Via MIT Technology Review

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By Jamie Condliffe

Don’t lean against the light switch at the Synlight building in Jülich, Germany—if you do, things might get rather hotter than you can cope with.

The new facility is home to what researchers at the German Aerospace Center, known as DLR, have called the “world's largest artificial Sun.” Across a single wall in the building sit a series of Xenon short-arc lamps—the kind used in large cinemas to project movies. But in a huge cinema there would be one lamp. Here, spread across a surface 45 feet high and 52 feet wide, there are 140.

When all those lamps are switched on and focused on the same 20 by 20 centimeter spot, they create light that’s 10,000 times more intense than solar radiation anywhere on Earth. At the center, temperatures reach over 3,000 °C.

The setup is being used to mimic large concentrated solar power plants, which use a field full of adjustable mirrors to focus sunlight into a small incredibly hot area, where it melts salt that is then used to create steam and generate electricity.

Researchers at DLR, though, think that a similar mirror setup could be used to power a high-energy reaction where hydrogen is extracted from water vapor. In theory, that process could supply a constant and affordable source of liquid hydrogen fuel—something that clean energy researchers continue to lust after, because it creates no carbon emissions when burned.

Trouble is, folks at DLR don’t quite yet know how to make it happen. So they built a laboratory rig to allow them to tinker with the process using artificial light instead of reflected sunlight—a setup which, as Gizmodo notes, uses the equivalent of a household's entire year of electricity during just four hours of operation, somewhat belying its green aspirations.

Of course, it’s far from the first project to aim to create hydrogen fuel cheaply: artificial photosynthesis, seawater electrolysis, biomass reactions, and many other projects have all tried—and so far failed—to make it a cost-effective exercise. So now it’s over to the Sun. Or a fake one, for now.

(Read more: DLR, Gizmodo, “World’s Largest Solar Thermal Power Plant Delivers Power for the First Time,” “A Big Leap for an Artificial Leaf,” "A New Source of Hydrogen for Fuel-Cell Vehicles")