My works are designed to heighten people\’s awareness of the social space they share – as well as the uniqueness of their moment within it. The forms I create are inspired by innovations in mobile, sustainable, and modular architecture and by generative art processes. I\’ve long been fascinated by spaces such as Buckminster Fuller\’s Dymaxion House, that are designed to be mechanically shifted and/ or transmuted on-the-fly in order to accommodate different functions, needs, and/or inhabitants. These designs inspired me to begin creating interactive, machine-based installations capable of \’reading\’ their environment through sensor arrays and responding by altering sonic, lighting, and or physical elements within it. My installations may sense levels of activity, the scale of space, and/or the movement of people and in return, they provide a visual record of life in that space. Their record(s) amplify any evidence of change in the space – whether the change may be rapid and transitory, or more gradual or evolutionary in nature. My interest is in defining new ways in which generative and responsive environments might provide useful or poignant information to a community.

An example of this type of work I\’ve created is Translator II: Grower, 2004-6 (v2). This work is a small \’rover\’ vehicle that navigates around the periphery of a room. It hugs the room\’s walls and responds to the carbon dioxide levels in the air by drawing varying heights of \’grass\’ on the walls in green ink. The Grower robot receives carbon dioxide (CO2) readings via a wireless signal transmitted from a CO2 sensor mounted in the space. The number of people in that location breathing in oxygen and exhaling CO2 has an immediate effect on the sensor. My robot takes a reading of the CO2 level every few seconds and in response it draws a vertical line in green ink on the wall. The line height pertains directly to the level of CO2 (and therefore also the people traffic) in the space. The more CO2, the higher the line is drawn. Once Grower completes a line, it moves forward several millimeters and repeats the process. By the end of an exhibition, the bases of the walls in the space are covered with fine green lines that together resemble a cross-section of a field of grass. The metaphoric vision then, is that grass needs CO2 in nature to grow. Here, my simulated grass needs the breath of human visitors in order to thrive. The height of the \’grass\’ directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine\’s ability to create. This piece therefore makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them \’healthy\’ spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within.

My most recently completed work, entitled Curtain Wall, is a permanent, public art commission for the McCormick Place West building in Chicago. This installation consists of two main structures: a large-scale sculptural installation (approx 40ft d x 30ft h) and an interactive video wall (30ft h x 6ft w). The work references the architectural tradition of the \”curtain wall\” or \”glass curtain\” facade popularized by architect Mies Van Der Rohe in mid-century Chicago. The video wall display shows the building\’s atrium from the point of view of someone looking out of its grand front window – which is itself a contemporary version of curtain wall architecture. In reference to Chicago\’s \’Windy City\’ moniker (based upon the voices of politicians), the curtain wall façade depicted in the video breaks with reality when it appears to move along with visitors\’ voices. So, according to voice volume and pitch, the structure of the virtual facade begins to gently bow forward, distorting the glass and steel until it swings outwards, floating and then fluttering. It is as if the glass and steel materials become temporarily pliable – like a true curtain – blowing in the wind. I collaborated with several software engineers from the Computer Science Department at UIC to accomplish the visual effects in the video portion of this piece. The viewer is thereby presented with a grand and uncanny sight of material transmutation that is the result of their voice(s) and presence. The video wall is on display in the McCormick Place West and the sculpture will be installed in December 2008 and publicly unveiled in January 2009.

Currently I am working on a new interactive video project called n.udge. This is a piece that uses custom software to generate a world of architecture that grows, recedes, and evolves in response to visitor presence in an exhibition space. This system begins with a topological map of the space surrounding it and goes on to use this information to create a basic vocabulary of building blocks by which it may shift, replicate, join, grow, fold, and evolve new architectural structures from the one it is in. In other words, n.udge utilizes an architectural map of the space as the malleable, sculptural material out of which it may evolve new variations (or visions) of that space. It may also populate the iterative spaces with structural offspring in the form of furniture elements. All these generative behaviors are made possible through procedural modeling techniques which allow for the creation of complex environments from a handful of \’seeds\’.

—Sabrina Raaf, 2008