MIX-m (MIXed museum) -- 2005
MIX-m stands for MIXed-museum. It is a contemporary art museum that exists both in physical and digital spaces, in localized and networked environments. MIX-m plays with the dimensions of its architecture: a mix between a real museum space (here, the Bâtiment d'Art Contemporain in Geneva) (1:1), a digital space based on the dimensions of its host (1:x) and a model of this game-like environment (1:50). MIX-m has the ability to re-locate itself into this existing exhibition environment, transforming, mixing and extending it into new territories. It offers therefore a variable environment to create art installations. These works, commissioned by MIX-m, can now define and modulate their presence inside an extended space spectrum: physical-digital, real-simulated, localized-networked. MIX-m is a project by fabric | ch (architecture) and Simon Lamunière (curator).
fabric | ch was founded in 1997 by two architects, Christophe Guignard and Patrick Keller, a telecommunications engineer, Stéphane Carion and a computer scientist, Dr. Christian Babski, with the intention of undertaking architecture, interaction and research projects.
Initially the work of fabric | ch was essentially oriented towards the exploration of electronic territories (networks, data environments, artificial or virtual spaces) as well as “immaterial” (digital) architectures. Later, fabric | ch worked on the hybridization of these non-material territories with the physical ones, seeking to link a universe made up of bits to one made of atoms. The latest projects undertaken by fabric | ch reach further into the “real” world, dealing with different dimensions and driven by a concept of spatial interferences (variable intertwining of heterogeneous spatialities, times, climates and locations like the presence of global into local, public into private, distributed into localized, digital into physical, etc.)
Through these different approaches and phases of work, the architectural processes of fabric | ch have developed around the manipulation of dimensions (bits of information, time, space, climate, geo-positioning, gravity) and the association of related architectural and technological concepts (combination, multiplication, reduction, hybridization, displacement, ubiquity, s(t)imulation, substitution, interferences). Combining experimentation and production, the agency has sought to formulate new architectural proposals or fictions and to produce a form of contemporary and extended architecture.
