Robotic membranes: exploring a textile architecture of a behaviour

The relationship between digital and analogue is often constructed as one of opposition. The perception that the world is permeated with underlying patterns of data, describing events and matter alike, suggests that information can be understood apart from the substance to which it is associated, and that its encoded logic can be constructed and reconfigured as an isolated entity. This disembodiment of information from materiality implies that an event like a thunderstorm, or a material like a body, can be described equally by data, in other words it can be read or written. The following prototypes, Vivisection and Strange Metabolisms, were developed at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen as a means of engaging intangible digital data with tactile physical material. As robotic membranes, they are a dual examination of computational and material interfaces