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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica. 

Interactive Art + 2020

Walking Assembly

Brandon Clifford
The mysterious knowledge surrounding the transportation and placement of megaliths used by ancient societies eludes contemporary building practices. If a brick is designed for a mason to place with one hand, and a CMU is designed for two hands, anything heavier on a construction site is resolved with heavy lifting equipment. The construction industries addiction to fossil-fuel burning equipment has lulled contemporary methods into a false assumption that materials must be handled through dead-lifting. This assumption has irreducible implications on costs and access to the potentials of massive construction. Walking Assembly addresses the intelligence of transportation and assembly without relying on fossil fuel burning equipment. It imagines a future where that intelligence is inserted into the architectural elements themselves. This concretized intelligence is embedded for eternity, therefore preserving energy in each afterlife. As easy as it is to guide these elements into place it is just as easy to dismantle them, transport them, and reassemble them at a different site. The resulting prototypes are incredibly massive solid cast concrete elements that can walk and assemble effortlessly. The introduction of innovative concrete technologies was fundamental to enable versatility in geometrical design and achieve the target performance from the displacement of the center of mass. Walking Assembly decouples the false assumption that temporal architecture must be light-weight. It demonstrates that architecture can be fluid while also taking advantage of the deep properties of mass, whether they be thermal, acoustic, structural, or experiential.

While there are some constraints to exhibiting Walking Assembly (primarily the floor), we are happy to work with you to find the most exciting and appropriate solution for the exhibition.