DRIFTING CITY

Drifting City, a design collaborative based in Athens and Los Angeles, was active between 2006-2017. Partners Farzad Morè, Chrissou Voulgari, and Petros Babasikas, along with 30+ associates, designed and built works in Architecture, Media and Public Space.

Drifting City’s projects include public installations, urban projects, info-scapes, interfaces and exhibitions worldwide, including the webpage and interactive garden Dreamgrove.org, recipient of a 2009 Webby Award, Drip, a vertical garden pavilion commissioned by the Mayor of London for the 2012 Olympic Games, and River, an infoscape and interactive architecture renovation for the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens.

DREAMGROVE

Dreamgrove is an ongoing participatory projects that connects a webpage (and iPhone App) to an interactive garden. Participants write their dreams in a public, virtual field; the garden narrates them through an interactive soundscape.  There, through an array of motion and proximity sensors, visitors triggered a soundscape: zones of white noise, whispers, augmented sounds, and narrated dreams - spoken through trees. The project is a hearing-aid to a collective unconscious: it generates a surreal, other-worldly break with reality, expanding the range of the possible within the public realm.

Whereas dreamgrove’s virtual component is ongoing, the Interactive Garden has been realized as a temporary installation- last exhibited at the Athens Byzantine Museum in 2008. Dreamgrove.org is the recipient of the 2009 Webby Award in the NetArt category. The iPhone App was launched to mark the opening of the 2009 Hong Kong + Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism, where the project was featured.

Web Development: Dimitris Doukas
Original Sound + Music: Lambros Pigounis

COMMISSION, Unbuilt: Architecture Research Events: Athens Byzantine Museum 2008
Webby Award 2009 Winner
Ebge Award 2009 Winner
Invited Participant, Hong Kong & Shenzen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism: West Kwoloon 2009 Official Selection, Athens Video Art International Festival 2010

DRIP

Public Space Installation / London (2012)

‘Drip/There is an Island’ is a public space project commissioned by the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority as part of the “Wonder: Incredible Installations” program, installed at Victoria Park, London in conjunction with the Summer Olympic Games.

‘Drip’ is a large steel sculpture that contains an intricate vertical garden. Inside it, two separate hydraulic systems create water movement that nourishes 12 plants and slowly dissolves a canopy of salt into 14 stalactites. Dripping down and growing up, the two compete against each other in time:  the sculpture transforms as it turns its water circulation on and off. ‘Drip’ grows as it self-destructs. Atmosphere and gravity transform it, within months, into a steel, organic and inorganic hybrid. The project works like an urban hourglass, responding to and creating its own weather, growing rapidly when it rains.

THE RIVER

Infoscape + Interactive Architecture for the Onassis Cultural Centre / Athens (2012)

The River is a permanent intervention commissioned by the Onassis Cultural Centre to serve multiple functions within and around its recently completed contemporary performing arts center in Athens. The River is a continuous strip which loops from the street, through the lobby and towards the stage- along its path, it serves as the structural hardware upon which both virtual software and physical architectural elements are plugged in: it broadcasts images, words and information;  it directs movement;  it generates encounters and creates collectivities through touch.

Interactive, digital, analog, fluid, object,  and discretely luminous, The River introduces and activates architectural forms and interfaces between dynamic events – the crowd, performance, traffic or atmosphere – and their representations – shape, notation, light, images and words .  The River narrates linear and non-linear stories.