OMNITOPIA: Towards a New Species of Space

06 August 2018 Architectural Association, London Welcome to Omnitopia! Omni (latin) - “all; of all things” Topia (greek) - “place, region” The context of ‘Omnitopia’ was set up as a way of describing an architectural site as a condition or experience. It refers to the omnipresence of connected devices and a condition of hyper-stimulation. The unit began by examining everyday rituals and behaviours through George Perec’s “infra-ordinary” lens in a contemporary culture where instagram and sifting through phone apps are the new banalities. These social norms became magnified and collapsed into a dinner party, presented as a multimedia installation called the “The Dinner In-Between”. Set behind a curtain, only 12 people could be part of the dinner conversation and interior atmosphere while it was live streamed for the outside audience. Guided by disrupted scripts and shifting perspectives of scale, this dining performance could be experienced from the perspective of a seated guest or as food on a plate - from eating to being eaten. In an age where our online activities are being consumed by tech companies in the form of data, the dinner party was used as an absurd theatre of social media feeds, clickbait and bad emotions, spread out on a perfectly laid table of paper tableware. Credits: Tutors: Flavie Audi, Samantha Lee, Farvash Razavi AV Support: Patrick Morris Students: Anna Maria Lamprinopoulou, Charlotte Mellbye, Chuhan (Loco) Gao, Dipal Patel, Gabriela Dutra, Maria Teresa Rodriguez, Nathalie Karam, Pakki Shen, Yangsihang (Rebecca) Wang, Yani Zhang, Yann Friederich For more information:

Summer School 2018 – Bits, Bytes, Fragments

Unit 1: Omnitopia Brief

Flavie Audi Flavie Audi on AA Conversations Samantha Lee Samantha Lee on AA Conversations Farvash Razavi