During his presentation at ciber@rts Bilbao in April of 2004, Mike Phillips, Director of I-DAT, revealed a number of Arch-OS visualizations at work. Many of these examples are available at the i-DAT website, http://www.arch-os.com/. Phillips asserted thatArch-OS has been developed to "manifest the life of a building and provide artists, engineers and scientists with a unique environment for developing transdisciplinary work and new public art." [2] Arch-OS has indeed spawned an on-going cadre of research by musicians, composers, digital artists, and trans-media collaborators. For example, Eduardo Reck Miranda's digital audio composition, PSQ Symphony #1, was performed for the opening of Portland Square on 15 July, 2003. This generative sonic work feeds off real-time data from the Arch-OS Core to re-synthesize and model vocalizations sampled from a variety of monkeys, resulting in a variety of hybrid voices and drum-and-bass-like rhythmic sequences. Considering PSQ Symphony #1 from a cybernetic point of view, it is interesting how data from the Core output is used to model this symphony, and that this mediation (the symphony) -- when amplified into the Portland Square interior -- becomes part of the updated Core input, initiating a recursive, self-generative feedback loop. PSQ Symphony #1 is available for download at http://www.arch-os.com/media/psq1.html.

The Arch-OS website provides links to a number of projects in nascent stages of development; among the ones most interesting to me is the Water/data-fall project, where [BEMS] data from the Arch-OS Core -- mapping real-time water usage within the building -- is used to control the density of a projected waterfall in the Atrium. Over time, occupants of the building "learn to interpret the data flow, and this knowledge begins to influence their collective behavior to reduce water consumption." [3] During a conversation with Phillips on November 11, 2004, I learned that some funding for the Water/data-fall project has been secured, and that the project will be happening soon. Current projects include Lab Culture, an artist residency involving ten artists; Lucy Kimball's Making a Difference (http://www.i-dat.org/projects/makingdifference/); and Mike Phillip's own recent implementation linking the Portland Square site with the China Electronic Music Center, the Central Conservatory of Music, and the Department of Digital Art and Design at Peking University.

Arch-OS is clearly located within a trajectory of socially responsive architectures that includes Archigram, Potteries Thinkbelt (PtB), and the Fun Palace. These visionary, post-war proposals marked "a shift from a determined and mechanical architectural paradigm to the fluid and indeterminate model of the information age" [4], defining a trajectory that Arch-OS builds upon and extends into the future. As Cedric Price's PtB proposed to utilize the vast railway networks of the North Staffordshires, the networked Arch-OS virtualizes, concretizes, and extends the agendas of Archigram, Fun Palace, and Potteries Thinkbelt through a proactive advance into a second-order social cybernetic model. According to Phillips, the intention is to re-engineer or re-program a buildings' inhabitants through the system. One could see it as part of a techno-ecological agenda which, through the integration of intelligent and responsive systems, engenders intelligent users. [5]

Arch-OS creates an architecture of becoming, responsive to social forces and conditions, a "cybrid" system, where "…physical and virtual domains become interdependent: actions in the material and virtual spaces mutually affect one another." [6]

Arch-OS is an extremely significant development in architecture, urban planning, and art. Through making the invisible elements of lived architecture tangible, Phillips and the members of the Institute of Digital Art and Technology have created a unique and dynamic interface for research, for collaborative, educational, and cultural interventions, as well as a truly humanitarian work environment.

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