LeeMundwiler, CHiLL, Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

Call it a “situation”? It can be a thing or a place. It can be a cultural or universal matter that we would have never thought of or we would have never seen or been, like Inuit’s ONE HUNDRED words for ‘snow’, or the fleeting chirp billions of years away coming from outer space. Time collapsed in space and time and space that define the uni(?)verse prescribes our being.
“CHiLL” is an interactive architecture that has its own game plan.
It is one of many gestures in perceiving architecture with a distinctive vocabulary. Further, it contains a metaphor calling out the imminent peril of our existence. Its broad purpose is for users and viewers to become aware of how intricate the interconnected world we are in is.
By employing the technological and mechanical applications outside of architectural norm, the intention here is to investigate how the new system that is nearly polar-opposite to the reciprocal design approach would disturb the architectural principle we consent to. This calculated approach is to provoke the system of static, inflexible, and archaic that limits design on a complex and experimental plane. Even though computation is not a final destination, the parametric design tools require us to logically think in a different algorithm that, subordinated in it, offers new uncharted opportunities to explore further. Therefore, the ambition of this experiment is not to answer, rather to question.
What if architecture is no longer a static entity; rather, it is engineered to be an animated autonomy that self regulates its own destiny as a living organism that thrives in a challenging environment. It endures and is adapted to ever-changing conditions by reacting to the external forces:
• CHiLL, animated with its own game plan, awaits.
A provocateur appears on the scene with its own determination.
• CHiLL awakens, perceives, and triggers gnostic movement.
The movements of the two is synchronized and engaged in
an interactive play.
The exterior surface is consisted of 500+ movable mechanic nerves, attached to the core spine. As an instigator enters the inner space of CHiLL, the sensor perceives the visual movement of the instigator. The data will be delivered to the “brain” for analysis, interpreting “meanings” to control the mechanic nerves on its exterior in reaction to the instigator’s appearances and actions within.