ADF's 2018 Lecture Season, Wolfgang Buttress

Wolfgang Buttress creates multi-sensory artworks that draw inspiration from our evolving relationship with the natural world. His public artworks – simple, elegant and contextual – seek to define and celebrate a sense of place and the sublime. He has received numerous awards for “Hive” at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London as well as the UK Pavillion Milan Expo in 2015. For Hive, accelerometers (vibration sensors) are used to measure the activity of a real bee colony, and feed real-time signals to a 1000 RGBW LED light array inside the spherical void. Algorithms are used to convert the bee colony vibrations into lighting effects. With AUTOMATA, we are interested in understanding how embedded technology and automation change our perception of and experience in the built environment. We also wonder how robotics and advanced materials and construction methods are being utilized by designers. Our lecturers includes artists and designers who employ automation in their work as well as those whose design ideas take advantage of ambient technologies.