Soft Monument Schemata (Working title)

A year long ongoing research project. 2020 - recent

The Soft Monument scenario assumes that human body as a form of dynamic architecture itself — a living system of emotions, with our muscles carrying memories of physical wounds and emotional trauma, our feelings and experience that shape our forms and transform how we carry bodies everyday.

I am interested in the question of how a soft monument can change the narrative of a distinctive space and location identity, and most importantly, incorporate human stories into urban planning and the vision of the future of towns and cities? How can we reclaim or disrupt monument structure by means of new ways of seeing and visualizing of our own body within their psychological, social and historical context in space?

The process

From Capoeira to Breakdance, from Ballet to Modern dance, from motion tweening animation in Flash in the early 2000 to pattern recognition in computer vision, to body tracking and pose estimation computation in machine learning and AI in 2020, the same basic premises applied as a general rule and terms to a lexicon for storytelling.

Our intention is to focus on a conditionally designed, rule-bound, and process oriented representation of both mentally and algorithmically constructed bodily architecture. Following these steps:

Key bodily movements and transitions are pre-defined with place pallets and memory through a series of interviews
Stage or an environment are pre-defined and site specific
Soft architecture forms are computationally generated.

photo caption: dancer Phyllistine Travis at Hunts Point Riverside park, Bronx New York, 2020

Access to Research

Part of the process during this research is to create and share our tools that are being utilized to visualize the soft architecture of our bodies and its psychological space. As tools are being developed, either as AR lens for popular social apps, or in the future, a stand alone smart phone app that anyone can download and use. I am interested to see more discussion around the personal implications of carrying these invisible structures with us.

Currently, you can unlock Series #1 with this link to Monumata , a Snapchat lens, or use the search function on snapchat.

Ongoing Effort

I am in the process of interviews, produce site specific choreography, and create tools and work in AR. My hope is that this research can eventually translate to a codex of new monuments that look at how bodies and emotions are being perceived in public, and to create the incremental growth of our city, and shape decisions of city and urban planning design through the recreation of location identity and personal narratives. What does a living system of monuments look like?