Soft Immortality
Soft Immortality
United Kingdom/Germany/ Embodied sculpture
Taking slices of a full-body human MRI scan, this architectural sculpture questions the common representations of the body in the digital realm as a series of surfaces and layers, creating a second avatar like state in a solid form.
Soft Immortality is a work, exploring advanced medical visualisation techniques within an architectural embodiment; juxtaposing the voluptuous convoluted baroque with the fluidity of a voxel data driven medical envisioning of the human body. The work explores the construct of the human body as a new ecology of densities on the boundary between biological and digital imprints. The dissolution of the body’s anatomical boundaries allows the reconsideration and recreation of it as a new physical territory in constant flux and change. It questions the common representations of the body in the digital realm as a series of surfaces and layers, and creates a potentially new status where the modulation of the body’s inner and outer surfaces becomes irrelevant in the face of voxel driven volumetric structures. Advanced medical visualisation techniques – Magnetic Resonance Imaging – are used both as method and tool to redesign the body with variable intensities of matter. The obsolete notion of a finite body is exposed in favour of a new type of body-space that is, above all, a viscous field of variable concentrations of mass and matter.
‘Soft Immortality’, takes slices of a full-body human MRI scan and uses them to invest a newly created structure with viscous properties. Space, here, is generated as an inherited property of density; it dissolves boundaries in favor of a state of flux. Objects of varying densities are allowed to interact with each-other: solid, semi-opaque, organ-like ‘syncretic transplants’ are suspended above a solid black surface echoing and creating a Doppelgaenger a second avatar like state.
Studio Tobias Klein
Tobias Klein, Dip. Arch (Dist.), M. Arch (UCL) was born in 1979 in Bonn, Germany. He studied Architecture at the RWTH Aachen, Germany, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and finished his studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
He is the Unit Master of the Diploma 1 Studio at the Architectural Association in London and runs a Media Studies class at the AA. He has lectured and given workshops internationally (Madrid, Spain – Lund, Sweden – Berlin,Germany – TU Munich, Germany …) and was an invited critic at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture – Paris, The Bartlett, Cambridge, Brighton University, Oxford Brookes, London Southbank, Greenwich and Nottingham to name a few instances. Since 2010 he is an appointed Guest Professor at the TU Innsbruck; Studio 3, Institute for experimental architecture.
His work is internationally exhibited (Royal Academy Summer Show 2006 – Winner of the student prize and 2009, 2010, 2011…), the Venice Biennale 2010, the ARAM Gallery and the V&A 2012 and published in various books such as, AD – Neoplasmatic Design (edited by Marcos Cruz), Digital Architecture Now (by Neil Spiller),
Drawings (by Sir Peter Cook) and magazines – Architectural Review, Architectural Journal, BD, AD, Arch +, etc.
In 2011, he founded Studio Tobias Klein, a practice, operating in the area between art and architecture, across the fields of art and installation, experimental design, interactivity and sculpture. While maintaining a fascination with the construction of space, instigating a repositioning between embodiment, perception and projection, the practice’s work constantly evolves between static and dynamic models, shifting from objects to installations and design, prospecting new visual territories in the field of narrated embodied space. His current research project and interest explores the human body as a new ecology of densities in which the dissolution of its anatomical boundaries allows rethinking and recreating it as a new physical/representational territory in constant flux and change. By using advanced medical visualisation techniques (MRI and CT as well as Voxel systems) as both methods and tools to redesign the body with variable intensities of matter, the obsolete notion of a finite body is exposed in favour of new type of body-space that is, above all, a viscous gradient field of variable concentrations of mass and matter.
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