UTS ART Audio Described Tours

Audio Description by Imogen YangMusic: Ethan Sloan- Lattermath

Music: Ave Air- I Know You Have Been There

Music: Curved Mirror- Parallel Events

Music: Ave Air- I Know You Have Been There

Music: Ethan Sloan- Lattermath

Music: Van Sandano- Santosha

Music: Distant Encounter by Curved Mirror

Music: Craft Case- Secret Cargo

Music: Ethan Sloan- Lattermath

Music: Sarah The Instrumentalist- Peach Clouds

Music: Brendan Moeller- In Search of Wonder

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.Music: Parallel Events by Curved Mirror

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.Music: Overcome Is What We Do by Giants' Nest

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.Music: Los Pilotos by Thief of Botanic Knowledge

Fit for Purpose brings together six international designers and collectives whose work is driving change through explorative, sustainable, ethical and collaborative practices. Curated by artist, designer and lecturer in the UTS School of Design, Armando Chant, the exhibition includes unique garments and shoes, process samples, patterns and sketchbooks together with video interviews with the designers.

Audio Description by Imogen Yang of InsightfulFit For Purpose is curated by Armando ChantMusic:Overcome Is What We Do by Giants' NestParallel Events by Curved MirrorStrange Grooves by Gunnar JohnsonThe writer by SmartfaceAcid Flavor by Short kipLos Pilotos by Thief of Botanic KnowledgeFugent by Lupus Nocte

UTS Art Assistant curator, Eleanor Zeichner, speaks to Armando Chant about the exhibition, Fit For Purpose.

Their Sea is Always Hungry is a solo exhibition by Australian-Balinese artist Leyla Stevens. Encompassing new works in video and installation, the exhibition explores the spectral trace of Indonesia's 1965–66 anti-communist killings and the hidden histories that contest its position as an island paradise.Their Sea is Always Hungry uses speculative and documentary modes of filmmaking to consider the impact of the silenced history of Indonesia's 1965–66 mass violence in which a reported 80,000 people died in Bali alone. In counterpoint, the exhibition features a feminist retelling of the 1970s cult surf film, Morning of the Earth, which sold a vision of Bali as an exotic surfer paradise, particularly within the Australian imagination.Credits: (By Leyla Stevens)This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, it arts funding advisory body. Their Sea Is Always Hungry by Leyla Stevens is powered by Lupa, a media player for art galleries.This projects was realised through the generosity and talent of my creative collaborators. Special thanks to Wayan Martino for making ever shoot possible. Special acknowledgements to those who shared with me their stories of survival from 1965 abuses and hose histories this project is ultimately dedicated to. And as always, to Seth and Elka, the backbone and heart of every undertakingAlia Swastika is a curator, project manager and writer for projects in Indonesia and abroad. She is Director of Jogja Biennale Foundation and was co-artistic director for the Gwangju Biennale IX (2012): Roundtable. Alis recently founded 'Study on Art Practices,' a platform for research into contemporary art in Indonesia and writes for Frieze, Art Form, Broadsheet journal and many others.

3 channel video installation, stereo sound, 10:58 minutesPerformer: Cok SawitriProduction Assistance: Wayan MartinoCamera Operator: Wayan Martino, Leyla StevensCamera Assistance: Medy MahasenaAudio Mastering: Tim BrunigesEditing: Leyla Stevens

2 channel video, 12:20 minutesPerformers: Ninus and Kadek Intan Kirana SariProduction Assistance: Wayan MartinoCamera Operators: Wayan Martino, Leyla Stevens and Prema AnandaEditing: Leyla Stevens

3 channel video, stereo sound, 9:45 minutesPerformers: Bonne Gea and Dhea NatasyaCamera Operators: Wayan Martino and Leyla StevensCamera Assistance: Medy MahasenaWater Camera Operator: Paul BakerSound Design: Tim BrunigesEditing: Leyla Stevens

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of crossdisciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of crossdisciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science. The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of cross disciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.Produced by ANATCurated by ExperimentaCurator: Jonathan ParsonsAssociate Curator: Nicky Pastore

Transcripts:A flat screen on the back of the front wall panel is showing a documentary on a loop: BIOSPHERES AND THE RISE OF BOTANICAL CAPITAL The documentary explores three large-scale enclosed complexes, which reproduce fully controlled sections of the natural world: The Eden Project in Cornwall England, the MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) in Barcelona and the Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Text reads: Since Climatron in St. Louis Missouri in the 1960s, large scale interiors housing whole biomes of climatic regions have emerged in recent years reflecting the hubris of late-modern capitalism in the heightened combination of entertainment and ecology within a controlled environment. These closed worlds are not only key sites of engineering and environmental production, but also revive what was previously considered a utopian project in the postwar period, to temper and fabricate the environment as a site of architectural production. Similarly to the botanical worlds of Eden and Biosphere 2, the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates, the Dubai Ski Centre, the New Century Global Centre in Chengdu, China, as well as the integrated casino resorts in Macau, the recent revival of artificial manufactured natures is astonishing to witness and analyse, as a paradoxical response to the global energy crisis and the intensification of detrimental natural events. Biospheres were born under the background of a persistent public belief that catastrophe, due to climate change and insufficient resources, is imminent and thus emulates a new technologically equipped type of “spaceship earth,” or a Noah's ark for the earth's depleting flora. Lydia Kallipoliti and Daniel Ruan Sponsored by the Robert S. Brown' 52 Faculty Fellowship Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York

Transcripts:Living in an ecological microcosm virtual reality experienced by Amber Bartosh. The closed worlds VR experience positions you as a user within a virtual diagram of two ecological houses built in the 1970s in London and Sydney. Both houses were built as laboratories and living experiments. They were occupied by their architects as part of the experiment. Virtual reality initiates an experience through different sounds and perspectives to convey the conversion of waste to energy. Your involvement evolves as you move, following the flow of energy and materials inside the ecological microcosms there are two choices in the virtual reality headsets. The ecological House and the Sydney autonomous house the ecological House/ Graham Caine London 1972. One of the earliest ecological houses the ecological house or street farm house was built in Eltham, south London in 1972, as a laboratory and living experiment by Graham Kane, a member of the anarchist group. Street Farmers, originally formed by Peter Crump and Bruce Hackett. The ecological house was a fully functional integrated system that converted human waste to methane for cooking as well as maintained a hydroponic greenhouse with radishes, tomatoes even bananas. Caine, then a 26 year old fourth year student at the Architectural Association of London, designed and built the ecological house on borrowed land from Thames Polytechnic, as part of his diploma thesis at the AA. He received a provisional two year permit from the borough of Woolwich district survey with the promise to build an inhabitable housing laboratory that would grow vegetables out of household influence and fertilise the land with reprocessed organic waste. After having lived in the house for two years with his family, Caine was asked to destroy it. In 1975 throughout the construction process Caine used himself and his family as a guinea pig in order to test the function of several components of the house. He experimented with his waste, his cooking habits, his use of water, monitoring closely every activity of daily practice until the day the house was demolished. Caine was undoubtedly the steward of the house. He alone knew how to feed the house with the right nutrients how to chop wood grow plants supply the engines and water the greenhouse. The architect, therefore was an indispensable biological part of the house he built and portrayed himself as a combustion engine for generating electricity connected to the house in a diagram where excretion becomes a vital constituent of the system's sustenance in many respects, the house was more grown than constructed. It needed care from its caretaker and without human presence, it's living by a technical systems would degenerate and die describing his house as a life support system, Caine satirically argued that the architect now being involved with the House's biological cycles may now relate to his own shit. Research by Lilia Kilipoliti. The Sydney autonomous House Sydney 1974-1978 In the mid 1970s architecture students at the University of Sydney gave Australia its first autonomous house. Their ambitions were grounded in broad environmental and social concerns but more specifically responded to a global energy anxiety emerging from the 1973 oil crisis. Encouraged by. The charismatic and politically engaged lecturer Colin Chole James, around twenty excited students used scavenged and recycled materials to build a structure on campus that could test the integration of various technologies for domestic self-sufficiency. The project included a wind driven generator for power and the students own designs for a beer bottle Trombe-Michele greenhouse wall, flat plate solar hot water heater and methane digester. While the students embarked on a DIY showcase for closed systems ecological design, they ended up with much more. A dozen people or more turned the structure into a home and continued to expand and tinker with it, installing a sleeping loft, growing a permaculture garden raising goats building a Coolgardie safe. All the while monitoring and reflecting on the experience. Exploring models for more ecologically attuned design and dwelling became as important as any technical testing. In the end, what was meant to be a one year student led design build exercise spilled over into a four year public experiment in sustainable living that gained coverage in national and international press. The house was host to a series of utopian energy fairs where children ran amongst the rabbit hutches, goat pen and the organic vegetable garden. It featured in television programs magazine articles and was visited by thousands of people. A mail order path that distributed the students on reflections on their strange experiment which they'd come to call the 'celluloid house' due to its media profile. The intermittent power supply, overheating greenhouse and malfunctioning methane digester had offered some hard lessons to offset the effusive interest. The students faltering, sometimes naive attempts to build a functioning autonomous house, grew into a sustained everyday engagement with an assortment of issues from environmental pollution and resource depletion to consumerism and centralized industrialisation. The redesign of the domestic realm, offered particular possibilities at a time when the personal was becoming articulated as political. The Sydney Autonomous House, became a site with a students private actions and budding professional practices could align with planetary needs. The emerging ecological consciousness of the 1970s manifested through building. Still the experiment was barely tolerated by much of the faculty. University administration detested the ramshackle eyesore in their backyard. It was bulldozed in late 1978. Research by Leigh Stickles.

Transcripts:#3 1943 Aqualung Can Man become an Amphibian Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan / Paris, France 1943Text reads: Even though devices already existed that enabled underwater breathing, the aqualung was significant in its ability to allow a diver to stay submerged for much longer periods of time.Invented by undersea explorer, researcher, and photographer, Jacques Cousteau and French engineer, Emile Gagnan, the Aqualung differed from other compressed-air devices at the time due to its demand regulator which delivered air to the diver at the appropriate pressure on demand. In order for humans to begin to freely explore the sea, Cousteau and Gagnan's invention created a simple and safe device that opened the door for further exploration and interest in the undersea world.Turning clockwise within the display tube at eye level, a panel of diagrams. Illustrations show the three-cylinder apparatus from different angles, with straps to harness it around the chest, and a mouthpiece for breathing into.A flowchart on the right shows various symbols under the headings Closed Worlds, and Odum's Energese, with corresponding definitions such as Conversion Energy Loss, and System Input/Output.Numbered paragraphs further round on the right briefly outline various features and drawbacks of the project. For example: One- way exhaust valve: A valve used to enforce a one-way operation of a system, allowing waste to be expelled without the entrance of new material. A one-way exhaust valve was used in Jacques Cousteau's Aqualung to enable a full exhalation of air into the surrounding water without any intake of water to the system.Experimental Casualties / 1. While the Aqualung was a success, many deaths occurred while experimenting undersea breathing technology, from the Bends to embolisms. The Aqualung is still used in modern diving technology today in improved models.Turning clockwise again within the cylindrical display unit, another series of illustrations and photographs from different periods. A dated looking drawing of an early version of a diving outfit depicts a man with webbed footwear and an large inflated balloon attached to his back. Patent drawings of Cousteau's designs for demand regulator and mouthpiece. A photograph showing a hamster and a mouse suspended in supersaturated liquid oxygen containers.Let's jump into another cylinder...#20 1972 The Ecological House What is The Power of Shit? Graham Caine and the Street Farmers / South London, England, 1972Text reads: In 1972, Graham Caine, a member of the anarchist group Street Farmers, built a house as a laboratory and a living experiment empowered by his own excrement. The Ecological House was not only a fully functioning integrated system that successfully converted human waste to methane for cooking, but was also built by its architect, who used himself and his family as a guinea pig.Ecological House features a complex architectural diagram, and this project is also featured in the VR experience.To hear more about the VR experience, go to the next link.

Transcripts:This is an audio described tour of the exhibition ‘Closed Worlds', at University of Technology Gallery Sydney - 7th May to 28th June 2019. Curated by Lydia Kallipoliti. Standing outside the gallery in the foyer space near the lifts, and looking into the gallery through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that forms the front of the gallery - the extended title of the exhibition is featured in large black vinyl lettering applied to the glass. The title reads: The Architecture of Closed Worlds Or, What Is the Power of Shit? In a heavy uppercase sans-serif font, with each letter tightly packed against the next, and the narrow notches used to create the shapes of the letters in the thick black lines creating a compacted effect that is difficult to read close- up. Looking through to the gallery within; to an open rectangular space with grey concrete floor, and white walls. The floorspace is clear, but the airspace within the room is filed with a series of suspended white cylinders, about 90 cm in diameter and 50cm deep, resembling large lampshades hanging from the ceiling. Each of these is open at the top and bottom, and hanging at varying heights above the ground. Each one features a different question in the same dense black font, such as: How clean is your indoor air? Can the body plug into the computer? Can curved walls keep your house warm in 47 degree weather? Are fish reproductive in outer space? How feasible is a ‘zero-carbon city' in the middle of the desert?Just before entering the gallery, there is a free-standing wall on the left with a panel of text facing outwards. The text reads, in part: Closed Worlds, curated by Lydia Kallipoliti, exhibits an archive of 41 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems. Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives with historical images, and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing that problematises the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres. Each drawing displays a feedback loop, wherein man's physiology of ingestion and excretion becomes the combustion device of an organisational system envisioned for humans, animals, and other live species. The moments of failure portrayed when closed worlds escape the designed loop cycles raise a series of questions about the ontology of autonomous enclosures. To read the text panel in full, go to the next link...

Transcripts:Closed worlds What do outer space capsules submarines and office buildings have in common? Each was conceived as a closed system a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy. The history of 20th century architecture design and engineering has been strongly linked to the conceptualisation and production of closed systems. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space closed systems identify and secure the cycling of materials necessary for the sustenance of life. Contemporary discussions about global warming, recycling and sustainability, have emerged as direct conceptual constructs related to the study and analysis of closed systems. From the space program, to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living closed worlds documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. While these ideas derive from a deeply rooted fantasy of architecture producing nature, closed worlds displays their integration into the very fabric of reality in our contemporary cities and buildings. Closed worlds curated by Lydia Kalipoliti, exhibits an archive of 41 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems. Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives with historical images and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing, that problematises the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment and the production of new substances and atmospheres. Each drawing displays a feedback loop wherein man's physiology of ingestion and excretion becomes the combustion device of an organisational system envisaged for humans animals and other life species. The moments of failure portrayed when closed worlds escape the designed loop, raise a series of questions about the ontology of autonomous enclosures. The exhibition archive, designed by Pentagram, showcases a timeline of the 41 prototypes that illuminates the ways in which they have contributed to the idea of net zero in our contemporary culture of sustainability. The timeline highlights the evolution of total circular resource regeneration from military research and the experiments of NASA's space program to more contemporary manifestations such as the benefits of the housing industry, countercultural practice for autonomous living in the city, nostalgia of the homesteading movement and ecological tourism and environmental capitalism. An adjacent display of speculative projects reflects upon a parallel historical narrative of enclosed spaces, figures of man and legislation related to closed systems. An expanded lexicon on environmental history derived from the study of the 41 prototypes is available online at www dot close worlds dot net. As part of this exhibition, the documentary Biospheres and The Rise of Botanical Capital. presents three large scale enclosed complexes which reproduce fully controlled sections of the natural world. The Eden Project in Cornwall,England, Amazon's New Biospheres in Seattle and the Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Finally the closed worlds VR experience positions you as a user within a virtual diagram of two ecological houses built in the 1970s in London and Sydney. Both houses were built as laboratories and living experiments. They were occupied by their architects as part of the experiment. This exhibition was originally commissioned by the store front for art and architecture in New York in February 2016 and supported by the Graham Foundation, The New York State Council for the Arts, Syracuse University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Its current iteration is supported by UTS art and UTs School of Architecture.

Transcript:This is an audio described tour of the exhibition ‘Closed Worlds', at University of Technology Gallery Sydney - 7th May to 28th June 2019.Curated by Lydia Kallipoliti.Standing outside the gallery in the foyer space near the lifts, and looking into the gallery through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that forms the front of the gallery - the extended title of the exhibition is featured in large black vinyl lettering applied to the glass.The title reads:The Architecture of Closed Worlds Or, What Is the Power of Shit?In a heavy uppercase sans-serif font, with each letter tightly packed against the next, and the narrow notches used to create the shapes of the letters in the thick black lines creating a compacted effect that is difficult to read close- up.Looking through to the gallery within; to an open rectangular space with grey concrete floor, and white walls. The floorspace is clear, but the airspace within the room is filed with a series of suspended white cylinders, about 90 cm in diameter and 50cm deep, resembling large lampshades hanging from the ceiling. Each of these is open at the top and bottom, and hanging at varying heights above the ground. Each one features a different question in the same dense black font, such as:How clean is your indoor air? Can the body plug into the computer? Can curved walls keep your house warm in 47 degree weather? Are fish reproductive in outer space? How feasible is a ‘zero-carbon city' in the middle of the desert?Just before entering the gallery, there is a free-standing wall on the left with a panel of text facing outwards.The text reads, in part:Closed Worlds, curated by Lydia Kallipoliti, exhibits an archive of 41 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems.Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives with historical images, and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing that problematises the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres.Each drawing displays a feedback loop, wherein man's physiology of ingestion and excretion becomes the combustion device of an organisational system envisioned for humans, animals, and other live species. The moments of failure portrayed when closed worlds escape the designed loop cycles raise a series of questions about the ontology of autonomous enclosures.To read the text panel in full, go to the next link.A flat screen on the back of the front wall panel is showing a documentary on a loop:To read the Video wall text panel, go to the next link.On entering the gallery, which is 14.5m long x 12m wide, there is a large floor-to-ceiling poster hanging on the left-hand wall. This is made up of four panels of tarpaulin, printed with scattered panels of text, images and large- font titles. This poster displays speculative design projects, various figures of types of man and buildings designed by architects, and references to relevant legislation and closed system guidelines.Wrapping around the far long wall and shorter one at the end of the room is a timeline spanning both walls - 24 metres in length.This timeline features all 41 projects featured in the exhibition in a horizontal trajectory that includes black geometric symbols to indicate project types, and coloured vertical bars to show types of net zero impact There is a clear perspex rack containing printed pamphlets with information about each project that can be selected for further reading by visitors.There is a text panel at the start of the timeline which reads, in part:Welcome to Closed Worlds...We invite you to explore various elements of the exhibition and to take home leaflets that expand upon each of the 41 prototypes displayed in the gallery. To learn more, please visit the lexicon on environmental history derived from the study of the 41 prototypes at www.closedworlds.netThe 41 projects are arranged chronologically, as follows: 01 1928 Cunningham Sanatorium/ 02 1931 FNRS Balloon/ 03 1943 AquaLung Amphibian Man/ 04 1956 House of the Future/ 05 1956Thermo Balloon/ 06 1960 Climatron/ 07 1960 Feedback Manand so on...The visitor now has a choice as to whether to follow the timeline around the wall to look at the projects in historical order, or to enter the open space containing the floating cylinders, to duck and eave amongst them and choose to enter the semi-enclosed headspace that each one offers to view the information provided inside.The cylinders are 90cm wide in diameter, and 40cm high. There are 41 in total. Each one poses a large-font question on the outside, and contains a wealth of information in text and graphic form.Let's take a look at a few of these cylinders as an example:#3 1943 Aqualung: Can Man become an Amphibian? Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan / Paris, France 1943Text reads: Even though devices already existed that enabled underwater breathing, the aqualung was significant in its ability to allow a diver to stay submerged for much longer periods of time.Invented by undersea explorer, researcher, and photographer, Jacques Cousteau and French engineer, Emile Gagnan, the Aqualung differed from other compressed-air devices at the time due to its demand regulator which delivered air to the diver at the appropriate pressure on demand. In order for humans to begin to freely explore the sea, Cousteau and Gagnan's invention created a simple and safe device that opened the door for further exploration and interest in the undersea world.Turning clockwise within the display tube at eye level, a panel of diagrams. Illustrations show the three-cylinder apparatus from different angles, with straps to harness it around the chest, and a mouthpiece for breathing into.A flowchart on the right shows various symbols under the headings Closed Worlds, and Odum's Energese, with corresponding definitions such as Conversion Energy Loss, and System Input/Output.Numbered paragraphs further round on the right briefly outline various features and drawbacks of the project. For example: One- way exhaust valve: A valve used to enforce a one-way operation of a system, allowing waste to be expelled without the entrance of new material. A one-way exhaust valve was used in Jacques Cousteau's Aqualung to enable a full exhalation of air into the surrounding water without any intake of water to the system.Another example- Experimental Casualties1: While the Aqualung was a success, many deaths occurred while experimenting undersea breathing technology, from the Bends to embolisms. The Aqualung is still used in modern diving technology today in improved models.As we turn clockwise again within the cylindrical display unit, another series of illustrations and photographs from different periods. A dated looking drawing of an early version of a diving outfit depicts a man with webbed footwear and a large inflated balloon attached to his back. Patent drawings of Cousteau's designs for demand regulator and mouthpiece. A photograph showing a hamster and a mouse suspended in supersaturated liquid oxygen containers.Let's jump into another cylinder...#20 1972 The Ecological House What is The Power of Shit? Graham Caine and the Street Farmers / South London, England, 1972Text reads: In 1972, Graham Caine, a member of the anarchist group Street Farmers, built a house as a laboratory and a living experiment empowered by his own excrement. The Ecological House was not only a fully functioning integrated system that successfully converted human waste to methane for cooking, but was also built by its architect, who used himself and his family as a guinea pig.Ecological House features a complex architectural diagram, and this project is also featured in the VR experience.To hear more about the VR experience, go to the next link...#33 1991 Biosphere II Can Humanity Recreate Itself in a Miniature Earth Bubble? Biosphere II remains the largest and most famous closed ecological system ever built. Its purpose was to test the viability of a biologically regenerative artificial environment in order to support human habitat in space. Space Biospheres Venture - a venture between Ed Bass, a businessman and philanthropist, and John P. Allen, a systems ecologist and environmentalist - spent approximately 200 million dollars to build and sustain the facility. Biosphere two supported two experiments where a team of scientists would lock themselves from the exterior world and create their own food and air supply within a heavily sequestered and maintained series of ecosystems.Project 33 - Biosphere 2 is featured in the video screening on the wall, in which archival footage can be seen showing people waving and farewelling visitors attending the sealing- in of the scientists, and later awaiting their re-entry into the outside world. The waiting visitors hold placards featuring slogans such as ‘Welcome Back to Bioshpere1 (the earth).More information about the video can be read at this link.Virtual Reality Experience:Living in an ecological microcosm virtual reality experienced by Amber Bartosh. The closed worlds VR experience positions you as a user within a virtual diagram of two ecological houses built in the 1970s in London and Sydney. Both houses were built as laboratories and living experiments. They were occupied by their architects as part of the experiment. Virtual reality initiates an experience through different sounds and perspectives to convey the conversion of waste to energy. Your involvement evolves as you move, following the flow of energy and materials inside the ecological microcosms there are two choices in the virtual reality headsets. The ecological House and the Sydney Autonomous House and The ecological House/ Graham Caine, London 1972. One of the earliest ecological houses the ecological house or street farm house was built in Eltham, South London in 1972, as a laboratory and living experiment by Graham Kane, a member of the anarchist group. Street Farmers, originally formed by Peter Crump and Bruce Hackett. The ecological house was a fully functional integrated system that converted human waste to methane for cooking as well as maintained a hydroponic greenhouse with radishes, tomatoes even bananas. Caine, then a 26 year old fourth year student at the Architectural Association of London, designed and built the ecological house on borrowed land from Thames Polytechnic, as part of his diploma thesis at the AA. He received a provisional two year permit from the borough of Woolwich district survey with the promise to build an inhabitable housing laboratory that would grow vegetables out of household influence and fertilise the land with reprocessed organic waste. After having lived in the house for two years with his family, Caine was asked to destroy it. In 1975 throughout the construction process Caine used himself and his family as a guinea pig in order to test the function of several components of the house. He experimented with his waste, his cooking habits, his use of water, monitoring closely every activity of daily practice until the day the house was demolished. Caine was undoubtedly the steward of the house. He alone knew how to feed the house with the right nutrients how to chop wood grow plants supply the engines and water the greenhouse. The architect, therefore was an indispensable biological part of the house he built and portrayed himself as a combustion engine for generating electricity connected to the house in a diagram where excretion becomes a vital constituent of the system's sustenance in many respects, the house was more grown than constructed. It needed care from its caretaker and without human presence, it's living by a technical systems would degenerate and die describing his house as a life support system, Caine satirically argued that the architect now being involved with the House's biological cycles may now relate to his own shit.Research by Lydia Kallipoliti. The Sydney autonomous House Sydney 1974-1978In the mid 1970s architecture students at the University of Sydney gave Australia its first autonomous house. Their ambitions were grounded in broad environmental and social concerns but more specifically responded to a global energy anxiety emerging from the 1973 oil crisis. Encouraged by. The charismatic and politically engaged lecturer Colin Cole James, around twenty excited students used scavenged and recycled materials to build a structure on campus that could test the integration of various technologies for domestic self-sufficiency. The project included a wind driven generator for power and the students own designs for a beer bottle Trombe-Michele greenhouse wall, flat plate solar hot water heater and methane digester. While the students embarked on a DIY showcase for closed systems ecological design, they ended up with much more. A dozen people or more turned the structure into a home and continued to expand and tinker with it, installing a sleeping loft, growing a permaculture garden raising goats building a Coolgardie safe. All the while monitoring and reflecting on the experience. Exploring models for more ecologically attuned design and dwelling became as important as any technical testing. In the end, what was meant to be a one year student led design build exercise spilled over into a four year public experiment in sustainable living that gained coverage in national and international press. The house was host to a series of utopian energy fairs where children ran amongst the rabbit hutches, goat pen and the organic vegetable garden. It featured in television programs magazine articles and was visited by thousands of people. A mail order path that distributed the students on reflections on their strange experiment which they'd come to call the 'celluloid house' due to its media profile. The intermittent power supply, overheating greenhouse and malfunctioning methane digester had offered some hard lessons to offset the effusive interest. The students faltering, sometimes naive attempts to build a functioning autonomous house, grew into a sustained everyday engagement with an assortment of issues from environmental pollution and resource depletion to consumerism and centralised industrialisation. The redesign of the domestic realm, offered particular possibilities at a time when the personal was becoming articulated as political. The Sydney Autonomous House, became a site with a students private actions and budding professional practices could align with planetary needs. The emerging ecological consciousness of the 1970s manifested through building. Still the experiment was barely tolerated by much of the faculty. University administration detested the ramshackle eyesore in their backyard. It was bulldozed in late 1978. Research by Lee StickellsA flat screen on the back of the front wall panel is showing a documentary on a loop:BIOSPHERES AND THE RISE OF BOTANICAL CAPITAL The documentary explores three large-scale enclosed complexes, which reproduce fully controlled sections of the natural world: The Eden Project in Cornwall England, the MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) in Barcelona and the Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Text reads: Since Climatron in St. Louis Missouri in the 1960s, large scale interiors housing whole biomes of climatic regions have emerged in recent years reflecting the hubris of late-modern capitalism in the heightened combination of entertainment and ecology within a controlled environment. These closed worlds are not only key sites of engineering and environmental production, but also revive what was previously considered a utopian project in the postwar period, to temper and fabricate the environment as a site of architectural production. Similarly to the botanical worlds of Eden and Biosphere 2, the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates, the Dubai Ski Centre, the New Century Global Centre in Chengdu, China, as well as the integrated casino resorts in Macau, the recent revival of artificial manufactured natures is astonishing to witness and analyse, as a paradoxical response to the global energy crisis and the intensification of detrimental natural events.Biospheres were born under the background of a persistent public belief that catastrophe, due to climate change and insufficient resources, is imminent and thus emulates a new technologically equipped type of “spaceship earth,” or a Noah's ark for the earth's depleting flora.Lydia Kallipoliti and Daniel Ruan Sponsored by the Robert S. Brown' 52 Faculty Fellowship Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New YorkAudio description read by Imogen YangMusic: Benjamin Kling, Ookean and Lupus NocteSound design: Jason L'Ecuyer