Medium Matters

Medium Matters: A mobile tool for seeing airflow

Genome of the Built Environment: Measuring the Unseen, Spring 2016, Harvard GSD
Teachers: Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani
Student: Catty Dan Zhang

This project attempts to acknowledge the existence of invisible air, which is the unperceivable matter fills up all the spaces between our eye and the visible forms of the built environment. By implementing means and methods visualizing it as a medium being seen through, inquiring the physical and mental reactions generated from this awareness of unseen matter. The objective of this research focuses on the actual action of seeing as an inducer rather than the visualization of the flow as a fact to observe and measure. It assumes the notion of the built environment as a volume instead of a void space with surface boundaries have impacts on our body sensorium as an ensemble.

Two key components in this project that have been explored are:

1) a system that could visualize the invisible air flow,

2) a mobilized instrument that allows the flow to interact with our own movements and allows the dynamic perception to occur.