The 2019 edition of SingaPlural Master Lectures, themed ‘Unnatural Phenomena’, were held at the National Design Centre auditorium on 6 March. The focus was the notion of hybridity in creative work, where disciplinary boundaries are blurred or taken down. Three speakers who work across multiple disciplines were invited by SingaPlural curators Bravo and Formwerkz Architects to talk about the opportunities and challenges in navigating territories that are at once unfamiliar and uncharted, and potentially boundless.

Elena Manferdini – Drawing As A Journey

The afternoon lectures kicked off at the National Design Center with Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manderfini sharing her work philosophy and projects, which span architecture, design, and art.

Manferdini talked about her interest in “using visual language to formulate alternate realities”, in looking for entry points into “another architecture”, and in “jumping scales” – in transferring a pattern in a piece of fabric (fashion) to an object (design) or to a building (architecture), for instance.

Elena Manferdini, Building The Picture

Manferdini is interested in “drawing as a journey” and the process of scripting – of turning pixels into vectors, or images into tectonic forms – is one approach in opening up ways of imagining and creating possible geometries, colours and behaviours.

Elena Manferdini, Building Portraits

Raffi Lehrer – Art Outside The White Cube

Raffi Lehrer, Associate Art Director for Goldenvoice, talked about creating and experiencing art in non-traditional contexts – or, in his words, of “producing art outside the white cube”. He talked about how art objects and activations can explore and reframe how art and the public engage each other.

Raffi Lehrer, Lamp Beside the Golden Door (Coachella), Gustavo Prado

He shared his experiences in working on projects such as Coachella 2018 where the programming intention was to “elevate the environment to more than just a concert”. He offered the example of Spectra, a monumental seven-storey-tall installation that not only contributed to a distinctive festival skyline and served as a landmark within the expansive festival ground, but also offered festival-goers an immersive, light-and-colour-soaked experience, as well as reprieve from the desert heat.

Raffi Lehrer, Etherea, Edoardo Tresoldi

Lehrer offered the view that powerful public presentations are often “visceral, immediate experiences” that engage with “no need for intellectual discussion”.

Brandon Kruysman – Mixed Realities

Brandon Kruysman, the architecture-trained Creative Technology Director of Novel Technologies, shared projects where the digital and analogue, the virtual and the physical overlap and interact in mixed realities. Believing that technology and new applications “is the way to unlock different kinds of experiences” in an imminent future of augmented or blended realities, Kruysman said:

“In my experience in Silicon Valley where everyone is trying to think of the next thing and innovate, I think architects can have an edge in a lot of ways and think differently about problems. That’s what exciting to me.”

Brandon Kruysman, Google IO Tree

He shared the latest developments in game engines and the potential impact this technology can have on physical spaces. Kruysman demonstrated several possibilities – including how virtual or ‘non-object’ collisions in augmented reality could trigger physical sounds, and how sound inputs can create non-objects complete with realistic shadow effects in real-world spaces.

Brandon Kruysman, Box

See more of Brandon’s work through Novel in the videos below.

Box – exploring the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces:

Google IO – augmented images:

Images courtesy of SingaPlural, Elena Manferdini, Raffi Lehrer and Brandon Kruysman.