Holoflux

Los Angeles–based cyber physical architect and a critical technologist Güvenç Özel engages the spectrum of human experience, from the physical to the virtual. “Our realities are no longer limited to the physical world,” he says. “We socialize, do business, and express ourselves more through digital media than through physical human interaction.”

From a distance, Özel’s 60-foot-tall Holoflux appears as a sculpture; as you approach, it becomes architecture: You can walk underneath and around the artwork, whose vinyl color gradient surface print plays with our perceptions of three-dimensionality.

During the day, the steel-and-wood structure serves as a portal to a broader digital ecosystem of ever-changing forms, which weave together and continually change with the surroundings and lighting conditions.

At night, projections of real-time video images showing the festival atmosphere create an effect in which the sculpture appears to become invisible and then reappears. Indeed, Holoflux becomes a hypermedia object with flickering and pulsating lights, projections, graphics, and changing color schemes that cycle through different identities.

Holoflux looks different from every angle. From certain directions, it appears to lean, almost defying gravity. From other directions, it looks symmetrical and stable.

“I consider architecture or the human experience as an ecosystem of different media,” says Özel

Özel, who teaches in the UCLA Department of Architecture, focusing on the impact of interactive media and emerging technologies on architectural experiences and the human experience. “It’s interesting to think about emergent technologies not as an add-on or as an overlay, but a fundamental part of the experience. They’re designed simultaneously to create that experience.”

Architecture, he points out, has always been an artificial experience. But virtual constructions — pixels in place of plywood — often present a psychological barrier.

“I call myself a cyber physical architect and a critical technologist,” Özel says. “Cyber physical, meaning the work covers cyberspace and physical environments and the interaction between the two. Critical technologist, meaning engaging with new technological tools — their meaning, their impact in our social interactions, their impact on our environmental and political considerations, and how we can create more meaningful and engaging experiences to enhance the way that we socialize and communicate with each other.”