Opening in late September in the Sullivan Galleries on the SAIC's downtown campus, Calculation and Substance will foreground design practices that use a variety of pre-existing and purpose invented, context specific hardware and software in the definition of design problems and the proposition of projects. Of particular interest will be works that cast architectural environments as an assembly of objects and processes that create responsive , "learned", relationships between buildings, people and contexts.
Examining parametric and algorithmic design, Calculation and Substance will reveal how current artists and designers, in order to reform and improve the built environment, are inventing and applying a new "middleware", that is, buildings consisting of situational software and/or hardware systems. This middleware interacts with a variety of sites and site conditions and points to ideas of human settlement more thoroughly and beneficially integrated into the complexity of some enveloping domain, such as the natural world. Prototypes of full-scope projects will be shown and the work will be "full-scale", meaning that it produces for the visitor a real-time and real-place experience.
