Aviary: Höweler + Yoon Architecture

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2013

Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon’s design practice, Höweler + Yoon Architecture, plays with notions of cultural and environmental performance as seen through the lens of new media and the information age. Many of their projects work across multiple scales, ranging from buildings to public space interventions and interactive art installations. They continually revisit the installation scale as a forum for testing new ideas, and indeed the project featured here, Aviary, can be viewed as having certain affiliations with their earlier interactive work, White Noise White Light, which was commissioned for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Comprised of a 50-foot-by-50-foot grid of audio speakers and fiber optics, the White Noise White Light installation effectively perceives pedestrian movement and responds by translating that movement into sound and light. The resulting visual and sonic spectacle exists as a virtual index of physical bodies in space and the tracery of their movements.

Located in the mediated public space of a commercial mall in Dubai, Aviary is an interactive installation that responds to human touch through the generation of sound and light. Conceived as a “shared musical instrument,” Aviary can be “played” by its users and in the process produces the sonic effects of “a bird in flight or a bird’s natural habitat.” A casual touch creates a vertical burst of light and sound, while a sustained touch gradually fills the column with light and sound. Furthermore, audio migrates across the poles, producing the effect of a mobile sound source. When the poles are not being activated by human touch, Aviary switches to what Höweler and Yoon call a “dream mode,” continuing to “play” through a series of “remembered” touch events.

Höweler + Yoon Architecture shares a certain lineage with Bernard Tschumi’s once-radical suggestion of architecture existing in the inscription of bodies moving through space. With an abiding interest in play and the infinite possibilities of human interaction, they re-imagine a twenty-first century virtual space begot by the historical concept of felt volume, provisionally drawing space in the mediums of light and sound indexing the motile human form.

Aviary installation in Dubai Mall. Courtesy Höweler + Yoon Architecture.