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Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables

View from the inside of a large inflatable. Sheets of white and silver make up the side of a curvy tunnel. Light from the outside shines in.

A feeling, breathing, sensing, sensory space of light, sound, textures, and shifting walls.

View from the outside of inflatables going around a patio. There is a wooden trellis above and an inflatable tube goes over the trellis.

Exhibition at Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center annual conference in 2021 in Asheville, North Carolina, US.

Feeling Air: A Psychospeculative Inflatable Happening explores material, aesthetic, and somatic qualities of large scale architectural inflatables. The inflatables were designed and built by architecture assistant professor Shawn Protz and the students of his fall 2021 project studio: Jasmyn Byrd, Miguel Castellanos, Alexis Elkins, Jessica Hall, Micah Holdsworth, Lalith Mallikeshwaran Rajagopal Sambasivan, Chris Noel, Oluwarotimi Osiberu, Rushabh Patel, Dylan Scallan, and Abigail Uhrich. I collaborated with them in fall 2021 by hosting a joint project studio in which my students developed an interactive experience with Emotion ML which took place inside the inflatable. My students took a critical making approach, inviting critical reflection on the growing prevalence of Emotion ML and its use for surveillance. Through our collaboration we explored translucence and surveillance in public space.

ARC 401/503 - Shawn Protz - Inflatable Studio Project (Fall 2021) from NC State - College of Design on Vimeo.

The architecture project studio put together a video showcasing the sensory qualities of the inflatables.

Paper

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  Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables. 2022. Noura Howell, Shawn Protz, Jasmyn Byrd, Miguel Castellanos, Alexis Elkins, Jessica Hall, Micah Holdsworth, Lalith Mallikeshwaran Rajagopal Sambasivan, Chris Noel, Oluwarotimi Osiberu, Rushabh Patel, Dylan Scallan, Abigail Uhrich, Aditya Anupam, Blaire Bosley, Rachel Donley, Sara Milkes Espinosa, Michelle Ramirez, Sanjeev Nayak, Anh-Ton Tran, Yiyun Jia, Yunfei Wang. Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference.   pdf

Funding

This project was supported by a Google TensorFlow faculty award.

2021