News from WikiPlaza Bastille. Liberte, Egalite & P2P
The blog has been a bit behind until now... But the WikiPlaza is rocking! Somehow everything has been too hectic until now, no time left to stop and write. From today on we will be blogging to have a record of what's going on - of course you can follow it as well, life on the stream, and multimedia in the media base.
I will start blogging about my own contributions and... feelings.
I got to Paris on the 29th, far later than the core of the group that had been there since a week before, with final production, building, installing hardware, netware and software. While in Sevilla and Barcelona i had received a couple of phone media messages with the advances of the project, but coming out from the Bastille subway station, turning right and seeing the dome there was a great beautiful surprise. It actually was much bigger than expected, even though we had drawn plan and 3Ds to place it and simulate its presence.
With my computer in the backpack and pulling a large black suitcase i crossed the street and started greeting and being greeted by the numerous crew of old friends: Sergio and Pablo from hackitectura, Laura on the production wheel; David and Michelle, from straddle3, responsible for the dome; Ewen, artistic director on the side of Cap Digital; Lluis, Zako, Benjamin; Belén and Borja with the Mille Plateaux space, Xavi in charge of sound and images, Alex and Eva with video; Joseanito and Simona with performances, Susana... the team of local French producers and collaborators...
The 29th, Thursday, was the day before the official opening and everything seemed to be ready and tested. The set up, completed with a tent to present several digital prototypes produced by Cap Digital between the dome and the channell; a node of service containers on the end-side of the square, looked pretty good. Perhaps a bit to high up, a bit too far from the ground, because of the modulation of the platform structure; and unfortunately fenced in part of the perimeter, because of security regulations.
Inside, the dome was pretty impressive, much larger than expected - almost 15 m in diameter -; David and Michelle had gone from grade 3 geodesic geometry, to grade 4, and it gives it a beatiful spatiality, quite a public space instead of a large hall, as we experienced it in 2007 in Valdecaballeros Emergent Geographies.
As for the smaller scales spaces inside it also looked cool. Two main pieces organize space. One is the so called situation room, upcycled from different previous projects, a horse-shoe shaped table, were most of the hardware and interfaces are set, with two main bands of screens that play it the image of control rooms. One of them with larger plasma screens faces the public entrance. This computers are available to the public, as weel as used for workshops and talks. The other one faced the other way around are connected to the computers managing the electronic, data and image flows of the WikiPlaza, within, inwards and outwards.
The second peice is what we call Mille Plateaux and it is a spiral couch, that extends itself as a table in one of its sides to accommodate the sound interface of the WikiPlaza. The spiral couch is a very beatiful piece, that we concieved and produced using topological geometry and CNC concepts, and that we indeed produced F2F - that is File to Factory -; designed in Sevilla, cut in Cordoba, installed in Paris - and that we will unmount and reinstall in upcoming projects. The idea of this space was to try to look for convergences between the texture of electronic space and the texture of new architecture, explore the material that people like Marta Male talk about... It will serve as chill and casual work space, as well as a studio for interviews and discussión to be web casted in the live video stream.
The walls of the dome, of course, function as the main interface, with projections and sound whirling around, projecting the bodies into the electronic space, to explore the new kind of participatory, creative, performative public space that we are seeking with the WikiPlaza...
To be continued...
Pictures on this post by bedebelen
