Feeling Air

Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables

Feeling Air: A Psychospeculative Inflatable Happening explores material, aesthetic, and somatic qualities of large scale architectural inflatables. The inflatables were designed and built by architecture assistant professor Shawn Protz and the students of his fall 2021 project studio: Jasmyn Byrd, Miguel Castellanos, Alexis Elkins, Jessica Hall, Micah Holdsworth, Lalith Mallikeshwaran Rajagopal Sambasivan, Chris Noel, Oluwarotimi Osiberu, Rushabh Patel, Dylan Scallan, and Abigail Uhrich. I collaborated with them in fall 2021 by hosting a joint project studio in which my students developed an interactive experience with Emotion ML which took place inside the inflatable. My students took a critical making approach, inviting critical reflection on the growing prevalence of Emotion ML and its use for surveillance. Through our collaboration we explored translucence and surveillance in public space.

Exhibition

Feeling Air: A Psychospeculative Inflatable Happening. 2021. Black Mountain Arts College Museum + Arts Center Annual Conference. Asheville, NC, US.

Paper

Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables. 2022. Noura Howell, Shawn Protz, Jasmyn Byrd, Miguel Castellanos, Alexis Elkins, Jessica Hall, Micah Holdsworth, Lalith Mallikeshwaran Rajagopal Sambasivan, Chris Noel, Oluwarotimi Osiberu, Rushabh Patel, Dylan Scallan, Abigail Uhrich, Aditya Anupam, Blaire Bosley, Rachel Donley, Sara Milkes Espinosa, Michelle Ramirez, Sanjeev Nayak, Anh-Ton Tran, Yiyun Jia, Yunfei Wang. Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference.

Funding

This work was generously supported by a Google TensorFlow grant.