Rooted in contemporary philosophies discussing issues of disembodiment, immateriality, deterritorialization, and nomadism, this body of work is a reaction to my surroundings: our commoditized society, the sprawl of characterless urbanism and its disjunction with nature, and alienation from our ancestors’ knowledge of life and living beings. My focus is to eradicate the lasting impact of our mortality on our natural environment and to promote the use of our technologies to forge a new model for existence in accordance with nature.

The new model, which I call Other Earth, is a counter-factual parallel dimension of Earth, based on my concept of Tentative Architecture. Tentative Architecture is an immaterial architecture that can happen at any time and at any point in space; it is an architecture that is immediately related to the bodies occupying it and does not exist without the presence of one.

In Other Earth, urbanism is rhizomatic. The nodes of the rhizome consist of individual nomads, living a technologically advanced, self-sustaining, and no-impact lifestyle; nomads who at any moment can break away and exist on their own, wearing their Tentative Architecture on their bodies and allowing their environment to be defined by non-material means and invisible infrastructures.

To achieve my goals of dismantling architecture and redefining a future lifestyle of intelligent drifting, I have been studying the limits of the relationships between various organisms and the bodies they occupy, be it the I occupying the physical body, the body occupying architecture, or architecture occupying nature. My initial explorations of the relationships between body and architecture form a series of studies that I refer to as Ubiquitous Habitat. A Ubiquitous Habitat is an element of continuity of an individual body into architecture. My focus is on studying the space and form of movements and actions and how by utilizing them, we define the form of our space.

An advancement of the concept of tentative architecture will come as the result of a hyper-evolution of our species, which is an evolution towards a new and advanced mind and body with fewer needs. This hyper-evolution can only come about by accepting a series of paradigm shifts. The first is furthering the role of our technologies in our lifestyles to move beyond being object attachments for communication and that they can take on a passive second nature role; second is a paradigm shift of our perception of space and architecture from what we have become trapped in; and third is a shift back to nature and accepting that a primitive lifestyle is an intelligent and highly creative lifestyle of freedom. This third point does not mean a shift away from technology, as I see technology to be a crucial part of the future nomad’s lifestyle.

I am influenced by the works of Madeline Gins and Arakawa. I relate my work directly to their concepts of ubiquitous sites. I also find much inspiration by Yves Klein’s Air Architecture project, an architecture of ephemeral materials such as air, fire, water, and space as defined by the body and the pursuit of immateriality and the void in architecture. The Situationist City and Constant Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon, has also provided the groundwork in developing my concepts relating to hi-tech architectures of nomadism and pleasure.

My past research has utilized photography and video to visualize the experience of tentative architecture. The artifacts of these visualizations are in felt, knit and fabric, and harness bio-kinetic energy to employ shape memory alloys and sensors. In future studies, I will be focusing on the role invisible technologies and infrastructures play in defining tentative architecture. The media-architectural concepts I develop through my studies support emergent architectures where form arises from natural pattern and nomadic systems where organism and form are all encompassing, becoming one, and adapting to multiple states. What I aim to achieve from these studies, is a scenario plan for a future detached from what we have come to be attached to: unnecessary stuff.


Thank you Bill Kennedy (inflatables). Photography by Chrstopher O'Leary.