Pablo Carranza: Evolved cantilever

Pablo Carranza: Swarm intelligence

Pablo Miranda Carranza is a Spanish architect who studied in London and now resides in Stockholm, where he teaches at the Royal Institute of Technology. His work is concerned with self-designing and intelligent structures, using artificial life and sensory inputs to explore new structures and spaces.

His recent work Responsive Fields 2 (with Tobi Schneidler) was shown at the Algorithmic revolution show at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. RF2 is an interactive architectural model where the user’s hands are tracked by sensors, through which they influence a population of agents living in a virtual space. The project is a continuation of the previous work Responsive field of lattice archipelogics.

Carranza has worked for several years at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, an experimental lab for intradisciplinary media work. He has exhibited internationally at ZKM, SF MoMA , UCLA and the Centre Pompidou among others.

Some sample projects:

The BioWall

From infosthetics.com: The BioWall is a simulation surface cells arranged as a 2D surface, the version shown at the Villa Reuge museum consisting of 3200 cells. Each cell is a minicomputer, with 25 FPGA (Field- Programmable Gate Array) logic gates, a touch sensor and a LED display. Each cell is autonomous but capable of communicating with its neighbours.

The result is a bottom-up computing surface, perfect for biological models like cellular automata, neural networks, Langton's ant and Turing Machines. The potential for interactive art should be obvious . In their own words:

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has plenty of materials online about the BioWall, including a number of articles and somewhat disappointingly a couple of patents related to the technology.