Throughout history, the human being has always been in need of generating virtuality as a liberation from the limitations of the present. We are involved in a fragmented space that combines the physical and the virtual, while the boundaries between these two dimensions become more porous, fluid, transformative and mutating. The real converges with the virtual in an assemblage of experiences, the physical and the virtual body no longer contradict each other, they intertwine. A hyperreality, where a secondary superstructure occupies almost the place of the real materiality.
Theorist José Esteban Muñoz defends in Cruising Utopia a non-binary or queer vision of the world, the rejection of the present and the insistence on the potentiality of other possible worlds. A queer aesthetic that is not an escapism from the social sphere, but rather the map for future relationships.
Contemporary bodies are made up of the interaction of biological and social elements that show the system of identities as a machine in constant multiplication, reconstruction and destruction. This new changing notion of identity coincides with what queer theory already announced, the understanding of the human being as a construct of borrows, citations, proximity... pure artifice, resistance to standardization and reproduction of the multiplicity of life.
Bodies that practice self-design through the transformation that takes place both in painted surfaces and in the three-dimensionality of physical bodies and artifacts. Self-design supposes rewriting the interior, the psychology, the political attitude and the interests in the external media: in the physical appearance, in the communication through fashion, in the objects that surround us, in the spaces that we inhabit… through self-design, the contemporary subject is capable of experiencing the multiplicity of being. The possibility of leaving one's own identity, breaking with the unity or the origin, to rehearse the different yearnings of the self.
The domestic architectural space thus acts as an element in constant interaction with self-designed virtuality, facilitating the inclusion of diversity, the multiplicity of being and singularity to test new forms of life that allow the user to be the artifact of their own identity. In Spinoza's thought, expansion, transformation, development, and differentiation correlate with the freedom of the individual. A model based on heterogeneity, inclusivity and change.
The intense chromatic range of blues and greens, lights, textures, steel, plastics and glass, pure and deformed shapes... make up a network of associations that are revealed in the interactions with the superficiality of the bodies. A superficiality understood as a means of communication that incorporates gradients of difference that modulate thickness, porosity, transparency or thermal absorption. In this way, the atmospheres or environments become a projection of the user's own virtuality.
The tension between the materials and their shape evidences the design technique and its production, using 3D printing techniques with different industrial finishes, metal laser cutting, and textured glass. We all know the promises of 3D printing, individualized goods, forms freed from the limitations of modern industrial production, exchange of files for production at destination...
Reyner Banham in his book Theory and Design in the Early Machine Age, explains the passage of the “early machine age”, based on the mass production of industrial objects in which their mechanical function prevailed; to the “second era of the machine”, in which individualizable and singular objects begin to be produced. A transition that represents the step towards an expanded notion of object, not only capable of performing a certain function, but also capable of modifying the environment from its presence, modifying and freeing the individual, as an extension of the human body itself.
But what interests me most about 3D printing is as a mediating artifact between virtuality and reality, an extension of the body itself that short-circuits the distinction between nature and culture, as a trans-nature in constant denaturation and artificialization. We find ourselves involved in a social compound in which the limits between living and non-living beings are blurred, a nature-culture continuum. Text description by the architects.
