SCALELESS uses the space of the GSD's Kirkland Gallery as a venue within which to playfully engage with notions of architectural scale. A 1:7 model of the gallery space was placed within the gallery, faithfully rendering the gallery’s interior behind a blank exterior. The model was situated just beneath eye level in the center of the room, beckoning the viewer to lean forward in order to see inside. Concealed inside the model was a webcam that captured the moment of discovery when a visitor first peered into the model. This video was fed in real time through two projectors onto sheer cloth mounted in the gallery’s windows. Precise projection mapping gave the impression that another, much larger person was looking into the window of the real gallery. The sheerness of the cloth ensured that the image will be visible from both sides of the glass.
The scalar shift between the video capture and its playback creates the sense that the viewers are embedded within a series of nested spaces, ascending and descending in scale around them.Certainty in the primacy of the human scale is a fundamental conceit of the design disciplines, but it can be undone by the evolving power of digital imaging and fabrication processes - processes that can create things so large or so tiny as to boggle the mind, or embed us in novel and unrelated contexts in rapid succession. Locating this emerging uncertainty in a modified architectural model, SCALELESS calls attention to the uncertain place of scale in our own discipline as it rapidly absorbs new technologies.
This transformation of spatial perception, in practice, reverberated socially. In more densely populated events, people’s individual and creative ways of interacting with the installation built upon and played off of one another, continually producing novel uses - hair curtains, internet cats, Beyoncé, group selfies and so on. People came back multiple times as they thought of new things they wanted to try.
https://vimeo.com/91641388
Alexander Jacobson & Gabriel Tomasulo