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The Pavillion of Serendipity

Part 1 Project 2004
Damjan Iliev
 Oxford Brookes University Oxford | UK
My initial interest in developing heuristic methods of working (a system which searches out an unknown goal by exploration) found its form in the design of an artificial hand / eye extension. The prosthetic apparatus distorts your perception of reality using sensory stimuli and optical recordings.

Curators Statement:

All instrumentation was used to cross-examine the gallery. Diagnosis exposed the potential of menacing and playful relationships between humans and machines, visitors and devices. Building becomes prosthesis: casting shadows and revealing alternative perceptions of objects, representations and sites. Prosthesis becomes puppet, I become puppeteer.
In the realm of puppetry, action and reaction are indistinguishable and all authorship eventually evaporates...


Damjan Iliev’s desire to develop techniques of orientation / disorientation via processes of ‘Intuitive Orienteering ’ led to the design of intelligent prosthetic body parts that alter one’s perception of our surroundings, aiding the production of chance mappings. Embracing cybernetic strategies as a means of evolving feedback information, the proposal for ‘The Pavilion of Serendipity ‘ (a prosthetic armature to The Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park) becomes a tool for the gallery’s curator. The curator takes the role of puppeteer, teasing the fabric of the building to enhance the staging of contemporary art, which occasionally performs in eccentric and unpredictable ways.
Tutor(s)
Ms Tonia Carless
Steven Bowkett
2004
People perceive with knowledge of prior experience. To alter our objectivity there must be a divorce in the relationship between perception and memory.
Perception will be temporarily modified to render a new reality.
The prosthetic device distorts your perception of certainty using sensory stimuli and optical recordings.
The eye is made redundant. In blindness people rely on their hands as an alternative in perceiving their surroundings.
Shadows projected by the device generate an alternative realm of objects and representations.
The relationship between the body and the prosthesis is analogous to the pavilion and gallery.
The curator exhibits representations of the real world, while the puppetry of the building manipulates your perceptions of both the outside world and it's internal representations.
The proposal for the ‘Pavilion of Serendipity’; a place where the familiar is made strange and the strange is made tangible.
The new gallery encourages visitors to practice acts of creative disorientation, so that they may be prepared to exploit the virtues of a serendipitous world.
The distance between prosthesis and host controller is extended in the form of puppet strings - prosthesis becomes puppet, host becomes puppeteer.
The puppets play havoc with the architecture and the puppeteer - a vigorous battle ensues.
The puppet strings can resist the gravitational force which tends towards a fall.
The puppeteer's workshop denotes architecture confounded by machinery: the boundaries of control continue to elude its occupants.
Speculative explorations reveal menacing and playful relationships between humans and machines, occupants and devices
Judgements made by the curator are subsumed by machinery until all authorship and control eventually evaporates...
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