I`M (Immaterial museum).
Model + digital animation

MEIAC Extension. New Media and Digital Art Gallery, Badajoz (Spain), 2005. Collaborators: Luis Cabrejas Guijarro + Hsiao Tien Hung, Jorge Saz Semolino.

In their most recent works and projects, Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda have demonstrated a professed interest in the redefinition of the architecture workspace, that which lacks a precise pre-established location. Always bearing in mind the social changes to which man/possible inhabitant has been subjected in recent times, which no doubt directly influence his way of occupying and inhabiting space on the one hand, and the new parameters of communication on the other, AMID develops an aesthetic of well-being where economy of time, nature, sensitivity and tranquillity become forms always adapted to functionality.

Humour and irony are among their strengths at the moment of elaborating utopian spaces or redesigning architectures with more splendorous uses when need be, but whose only purpose is that of being pleasantly experienced by potential users. Places for sunbathing and resting on the canals of the Dutch city of Amsterdam, certificates of habitability by the hour, factories covered with flowers or buildings printed with folkloric patterns are proof of this, this possible utopia. Spaces not regarded as spaces, places unearthed from the idea of being intervened or rezoned for a use that may make it comfortable enough for us to inhabit or pass through are the realm in which AMID spreads out its tools that, from a humanist view of the architectural discipline, draw untiringly from other areas of knowledge such as design, contemporary art, sociology, anthropology, always for the sake of sublimating man’s well-being.

The Immaterial Museum is a small gallery to house the digital art collection, servers and new technology workshops of the MEIAC, the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo. On entering this space the visitors are invited to put on a device connecting them with the museum and its server: a small medical patch with a radio antenna that serves to exchange small packages of data with the server and let the system knows each visitor’s position in the room. When connected to a personal peripheral — telephone, organiser or music player— the museum information is activated in step with the visitor’s movements and interaction with the work: a digital and physiological doorway into the museum. In addition, the gallery is the centre of a wireless network system that provides connection to the central server from any part of the garden and activates this fragment of public space, traditionally isolated from the city. When you enter your stick in your skin a patch that permits you to interact with the museum and the info contained in it; with a rfid antennae through your mobile phone. It is a museum with no physical content. Rather than a building, the Immaterial Museum is a disturbance, a map of the visual, climatic and digital displacement of the museum garden that acts by spatially defining a domain for human interaction with digital art.

I’M IS NOT A SPACE BUT A LOCAL MODIFICATION OF THE CLIMATE.

I’M IS NOT A SPACE. IT IS A POINT OF INTERCHANGE.

I’M IS NOT A SPACE. IT IS AN INFORMATION TANK.

I’M IS NEITHER NATURAL NOR ARTIFICIAL. IT EXACERBATES HYPERARTIFICIALITY.

I’M IS A PLACE FOR SOCIALISATION, BUT IS NOT A PUBLIC SPACE.

I’M CANNOT BE CROSSED. YOU MAY ENTER BUT THE EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE SPACE ONLY THE INTERACTION WITH THE STORED DATA.

I’M IS NOT A BUILDING. IT IS A SPATIAL PERTURBATION THAT GENERATES DISTURBANCES IN THE DATA SYSTEM.

I’M IS A PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL DOOR OF LARGE, MEDIUM AND SMALL SCALE. I’M IS A JOYSTICK, A C.P.U. AND A BUILDING ALL TOGETHER.

AMID [cero9]

347 Madrid, Spain. Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda started their partnership in 1997 as cero9, an open structure located in Madrid, which facilitated a real connection between professional practice, research and teaching. Cero9 was dissolved in 2003 and at present they are involved in the definition of a new work space, without a precise location, that expands the limitations of this type of organisation: AMID. Associated Professors of Architecture in Madrid. Lecturers in a big number of international Schools of Architecture. Chief Curators of lectures series and exhibitions like Corrupted Biotopes 2.0 (2004) or Arquitecturas Silenciosas (2000) including works by A&P Smithson, J. Prouvé, K. Melnikov and C. Price, held at the Fundación COAM, and the arched galleries of the Ministry of Public Works, both in Madrid. They have won more than thirty prizes in national and international competitions of architecture, among them First Prize (ex-aequo) in the 2006 national design competition for the Intermediae/Prado contemporary art centre in the old Serreria Belga in Madrid, (Spain).