AIR HUGS

The Air Hugs installation is a responsive environment activated by the color red, which receives, tracks, and moves with the passerby causing the actuated material to produce a calculated gentle breathing, contractions of rustling sounds, and fields of reflection and light. When the large-scale inflatable lungs fill with air, they encase and enclose the space around the body, offering a deliberate, delicate, and gracious hug. Rekindling the architects’ experimental side, the Air Hugs installation treats the gallery as a petri dish for combining space and computation to cultivate contemporary forms of experience. It explores the spatial effects of the large-scale pneumatically actuated lungs controlled with real-time computing and image recognition techniques. Reasonable yet absurd, the title draws from the use of air as a primary material and the hug, which offers an immediate awareness of one’s body and other bodies, and of the space between, or lack thereof, recalibrating human scale and enhancing social interactions. Combined air and hugs offer an otherness, which excites our present temporal existence and moves beyond the rigidity that most often structure our built environments.

Project Team: Noushin Radnia, Alireza Karduni, William Hutchins, Sara Shamloo, Hunter Sigmon, Swathi Sreedharan, and Lina Taheri