Jan Edler, from Realities United, gave a talk at York University on Thursday, concerning the outward communicative capacity of architecture.  Realities United is a studio art, architecture and technology group who, as their name suggests, seek ways to merge advances in the digital technologies with those in architecture. They are perhaps most famous for their display skin(pictured above) on the Kunsthaus Graz.

One of the things I like to say about the digital technologies is that they take ideas that were somewhat ephemeral for the brain, like connectedness or say how much TV you watch in a week, and make them literal and tangible. This can be scary, as awareness is suddenly thrust upon an individual (like when the Facebook news feed suddenly made all your activity apparent). However, more often then not, its extremely helpful. One of my pet peeves is how slow it take some institutions to adapt to this type of communication (don’t get me started on people who use fax machines), so I was quite pleased to see how Realities United was thinking about their work.

When debating privacy, I often weigh the negative invasiveness against the positive that tracking info will tell me about my activities. I found this same idea in Realities United’s  Big Vortex. The project is to fit the smoke stack on a waste-to-energy plant so that it communicates, in human readable terms, the amount of pollution it puts into the air. The smoke stack is to be fitted to make smoke rings out of a certain measure of CO2. The viewer passing by is able to account for how much CO2 they are seeing.

This focus on communication is all over Realities United and will soon be part of York.  Realities United is doing the lighting for the YorkU Subway Station due in 2015. Future Students, keep an eye out.