Spatial Forces

📢 瑶光 · Yáo Guāng 2025 · Hainan, China Observation Platform for Commercial Space Launches 🚀 Hainan has always lived at the edge: a military outpost, a tropical escape, an experimental frontier. Now, it becomes a launchpad for China’s commercial journey into space. Amid speed, spectacle, and verticality, we drew a circle. Actually, two. Not to resist the future, but to hold it gently, precisely, temporarily. Not propulsion, but pause. A hovering loop, a disc with a tail, negotiated from constraint: an untouchable existing structure below and a protected volume above. Geometry became contour. Contour became geometry. The resulting “6” quietly echoes a Chinese symbol of smoothness and continuity, an accidental superstition embedded in the plan. Twelve slender pillars carry the structure. A stair of about 100 steps introduces delay, stretching the seconds before liftoff. At 15 meters, a ring for watching rockets leave Earth and for watching ourselves. Minimal structure, maximum consequence. By day, anticipation. By night, the skin becomes a screen. A grounded architecture, briefly aligned with escape. Spatial Forces Team Yimeng Wei · Firàs Safieddine

Fragment of a Living Landscape A suspended specimen of the Calabrian ecosystem, celebrating olive oil as a life-enabling substance. Type: AR Digital Sculpture Medium: AR Artist: firas safieddine Fragment of a Living Landscape presents a suspended specimen and interpretation of the ecosystem within the Calabrian territory, where geology, flora, and cultivation converge into a single, continuous system. Rooted in the region's material and cultural identity, the piece brings together rock, olive branches, and a curated mix of Calabrian and Mediterranean flora, including citrus blossoms, broom, bergamot, wild herbs, and coastal species. From this mineral base, organic life emerges, unfolds, and transforms, with olive oil acting as a central, fluid agent that connects all elements. Both natural and constructed, the sculpture operates as a precise assembly of interdependent parts, revealing the underlying logic of ecology, growth, and extraction that defines the landscape. It is beyond the representation of Calabria, but a condensation of its processes, where the soft continuously negotiates with the hard, and life persists through matter. Synopsis A suspended fragment or specimen of the Calabrian landscape, where rock, roots, flora, and oil coexist as a single living system. The piece captures the emergence of soft, organic matter from a hard, mineral substrate. Concept & Logic The sculpture explores the tension between hard and soft: stone as resistance, life as persistence, and emergence. Organic elements like roots, soft flora, and olives penetrate and occupy the rock. At the same time, oil acts as a mediator, linking all components into a continuous cycle of growth, extraction, and transformation. Elements Rock / Earth → geological base, representing Calabria’s rugged terrain Roots → depth, time, anchoring Olive branches & fruits → cultural and agricultural identity Flora (Calabrian + Mediterranean mix) → includes citrus blossom, broom, bougainvillea, and extends to typical regional species such as bergamot flower, wild thyme, rosemary, oregano, cistus (rockrose), fennel, and dry grasses Oil → liquid connector, extracted essence of the landscape

A nice update just at the Chinese New Year's kick-off 🐎 🔥 📢 We've been chosen amongst the top emerging talents/ practices in China with international presence 🚀 It is great to share this space with amazing other Chinese designers and architects shaping the landscape of the practice in light of very interesting shifts and turns, in technology, the market economy, and a new society. If there is an challenging, exciting and a very much at the edge space to explore today, it's China. During the last year, taking part in projects at the urban, architectural, and product scale, we've engaged with a diversity of partners, clients, fellow studios and offices and most importantly, a changing market. The Future belongs to those who created it, today.

Hand in Hand 🤝 This audiovisual installation activates only when two visitors hold hands, closing a circuit between paired sensors. A simple, familiar gesture, associated with family, care, and reassurance, becomes the interface that brings the work to life. As hands connect, visuals and sound unfold together, translating touch into a shared sensory moment. Neither participant can activate the piece alone; the experience exists only through mutual presence. By turning an intimate, everyday action into a public interaction, the work reflects on how memory is formed through closeness, held, passed on, and felt between people rather than stored in objects. Collaborating Artist @rowanelselmy1 Project Team @firasdottxt @cristian.rizzuti @chicoe @01_etch

Weaving Stories 🧵 A collective interactive installation inspired by the social dynamics of the majlis, where people gather, sit, and move together. A central projector casts evolving sadu patterns onto a suspended textile ceiling, surrounding visitors within a shared field of color and meaning. Each traditional Emirati sadu pattern carries symbolic significance. Through simple physical interaction and presence, visitors activate different patterned layers, which gradually interlace into a single woven composition. Individual gestures accumulate into a collective fabric, transforming storytelling into an immersive, participatory act that reveals the cultural depth and narrative richness embedded within Sadu traditions. Collaborating Artist @fatimaalawadhi Project Team @firasdottxt @chicoe @01_etch @cristian.rizzuti

Coming Together 🫸🏻 This interactive installation pairs physical sculpture objects with their digital counterparts, four point-cloud scans of the artist’s hand-crafted sculptures displayed on screen. In their resting state, the scans appear fluid and dispersed, fragments of texture and memory suspended in space. As visitors touch the physical sculpture, the point clouds begin to converge, gradually reconstructing the object’s form. Individual interactions shape partial responses, but when multiple objects are touched together, the digital fragments fully assemble, revealing a collective image that can only emerge through shared interaction. The work explores the analogy of pressure, applied on ceramics to create form, but also in social life, and forms identity, personality, and character. In depth, it tackles social pressure as an engine, expressed in a playful way, where pressure on the physical objects is expressed digitally to form the digital objects. Collaborating Artist: Alia Aljasmi @aliaaljasmi12 Type: Touch-activated interactive installation Project team: @firasdottxt @cristian.rizzuti @01_etch @chicoe

In Our Words 📱 This immersive installation explores Arabizi as a living, collective language shaped by everyday digital communication and shared cultural memory, as well as a preservation and adaptation mechanism used to maintain communication in Arabic, and overcome the barrier of technology. Eight hanging textile panels define the space: four crafted with Arabic family-related words, drawn from الحقل المعجمي للعائلة (al-ḥaql al-muʿjamī lil-ʿāʾila) and grouped into four semantic categories, and four blank counterparts. The Arabic words are physically inscribed in ink onto bubble-wrap panels, embedding language into a tactile material presence. As visitors move and gather within the space, their presence activates the system, triggering projections that reveal the Arabizi counterparts on the opposing blank panels. Presence becomes the interface. Meaning emerges through proximity, accumulation, and coexistence, reflecting how language, memory, and identity are collectively formed across generations, scripts, and contemporary modes of communication. Collaborating Artist: Alia Sharafi @aliasharaf Type: Presence-based real-time interactive projection on textile Project team: @firasdottxt @chicoe @01_etch @cristian.rizzuti

What The Water Keeps 🌊 What the Water Keeps frames water as a quiet custodian of family memory and local heritage, shaped by generations of life along Dubai Creek in Shindagha. The installation layers archival footage and overlapping audio drawn from three intertwined domains: commerce and trade, craft, and marine life, forming a dense, living soundscape of the creek. Through tactile interaction, submerged images and voices gradually surface, revealing culture not as something fixed or archived, but as something carried by water, movement, and exchange. Rooted in its immediate urban fabric, the work reflects the creek as a site where memory accumulates through layers of activity, labor, and daily life, continuously transmitted between generations. Project team: @cristian.rizzuti @firasdottxt @01_etch @chicoe Collaborating Artist: @nayefishappy

Hybrid Faces 📸 🎭 👀 An interactive projection raising awareness on facial recognition in public spaces. Without even knowing, people's motion in front of the facade is live tracked using a camera, and translated into displacement on the portraits. It's an invitation to think about facial tracking and recognition in public space, therefore an ever shifting fake portrait(s). Projected onto a facade in House 436, this installation turns the building into a living portrait following the architectural grid and using the facade’s hidden structure as a framework for memory. A series of generated hybrid faces, created by blending the faces of the Interactive Public Art Programme’s participants and faculty. Each day, a new composite face appears, individual yet collective, at once. As visitors walk along the wall, camera tracking introduces pixel shifts and playful distortions, allowing movement to briefly imprint itself onto the image. Inspired by تذكروني - remember me- the work frames memory as something shared, fleeting, and continuously rewritten through presence, layering visitors' motion, hidden architectural blueprints, generative artificial intelligence, and the artist’s work. Size: 8*8m projection on facade Project team: @firasdottxt @cristian.rizzuti @chicoe @01_etch

📢 We've just been announced winners for the International Urban Design Competition for Nansha Bay with a great consortium of Shenzhen Urban Planning & Design Institute Co., Ltd., Guallart Architects SL, and Sumuding Architects Co., Ltd. 🚀 A Generative Urban Model // An Event City for the AI Generation 🌿 👾 Designed for mobile-internet natives and AI natives, the Nansha Bay Core Area is conceived as a city that can adapt, evolve, and remain human-scaled over time, while connected to its ecological context. Urban Strategy Framework - Event City as Urban Operating System Core ideas: 5-Ring Spatial Strategy → a clear territorial structure from waterfront to mountains, enabling a gradual transition from dense urban life to preserved nature. [ Waterfront → tourism → Innovation →living → sport → mountain ] forming continuous gradients. Superblocks as Urban Framework → providing clarity, walkability, and environmental quality, while prioritizing pedestrians, cycling, and low-speed mobility over cars. Flexi-Blocks inside Superblocks → Superblocks provide metropolitan order; Flexi-blocks introduce permeability, mixed uses, walkability, and human scale, with six floors as the dominant height. Green Stream Network → a continuous system of green and blue axes connecting mountain, city, and sea through slow mobility, ecology, and public life. Lived Waterfront & Coastal Urban Area → promenades, marina, culture, sports, and a regenerated Central Plaza transformed into a civic and innovation hub. A walkable, ecological, and future-ready urban platform, designed as a structure that can grow with new ways of living, working, and socializing. Sea ↔ Mountain - Green and blue corridors cut across the rings, linking waterfront and mountain as ecological spines, slow-mobility routes, and experiential journeys. Regeneration Before Demolition - Existing buildings are reprogrammed through minimal intervention and maximum programmatic change, enabling fast activation, continuity of memory, and low-risk innovation. Sports & Wellness as Urban Infrastructure A continuous Sport / Wellness Ring integrates movement, recovery, nature sports, and social life.

Recorded. Thank you for your presence. 📸 This corner-screen installation uses real-time body tracking to transform visitors’ movements into a shared digital canvas. Without interfaces or instructions, presence alone becomes the input, individual gestures merging into a collective visual field. Inspired by the Arabic notion of تذكروني - remember me- the system retains traces of movement as a form of digital memory, allowing each participant to momentarily inscribe themselves within the collective image before dissolving into it. Playful and intuitive, the work introduces the exhibition as a space of shared authorship, where public interaction becomes a living, remembered composition. The title is a nod to the research that brought this piece to life, raising awareness on private data, video surveillance and presence in public spaces. Type: Camera-based large-scale public interactive installation Visuals: @touchdesigner Project Team: @firasdottxt @01_etch @chicoe @cristian.rizzuti IPA Cohort: @aliaaljasmi12 @aliasharafi @nayefishappy @rowanelselmy1 fatimaalawadhi @solimar_____ @_daria_mineeva @make.with.nisha @clayonwheel Public Art House Curator @mozahhl

Neural Bloom 🧠 🌱 Synthetic sensing, cognitive ecologies, and collective intelligence for the age of planetary scale computation. Neural Bloom is a large-scale interactive installation that transforms biosensory data into a living digital ecosystem, where individual neural activity seeds generative landscapes of branching, evolving forms. The work explores intelligence as an emergent, distributed phenomenon- one that transcends the boundaries of the human mind to engage with ecological, computational, and collective systems. By integrating EEG inputs with real-time 3D visuals, the installation visualizes cognition as an ecological phenomenon, fluid, interconnected, and emergent. Participants' mental states give rise to dynamic "neural blooms" that grow, intertwine, or decay based on proximity, interaction, and collective engagement.  Drawing from neuroscience, ecological thinking, and complexity theory, Neural Bloom reframes intelligence as a shared, adaptive field extending beyond the individual mind. The work highlights the fragility and resilience of collective thought, offering an experiential reflection on how consciousness, like ecosystems, thrives through connection and diversity. Rooted in neuroscientific principles, ecological metaphors, and generative art practices, Neural Bloom offers a speculative interface where biosensing, algorithmic growth, and co-agency converge.  Project team: Firas Safieddine @firasdottxt Amir Habibi @01_etch krzysztof Galant @galant_art_design EEG data communications: @mikemicalromans Presented at the Art and Tech House EEG headsets: @enophones