Designed for mediated façade interventions, such as the Center for Civil and Human Rights (pictured), Site Immaterial enables ‘illegal’ immigrant community members to populate civic spaces through a generative animation environment. This content is presented as an architectural projection, mixed in real-time between the isolated immigrant community and the artist through a networked interface.

The network interface connects remote and onsite participant interactions to create a cumulative animated composition. This experimental intervention provides a set of digital constructs enabling an ever-changing virtual landscape to populate civic space with a collaborative, unpredictable physical presence.

Interactive counterpoints allow a community living in the shadows to navigate a generated virtual world to express issues of spatial and psychological distortions of self and provide an avenue of communication with the viewer.

As a series of parallel futures and histories, “self” within a migrant condition is emphasized through layered proximities – to each exile; to the viewer; viewer-to-viewer. Simultaneous and infinite within a cyclical relationship, bifurcating movements redefine the spatial relationship of encounters where time and space are deconstructed and our fragmented reality is negotiated through the lens of a participatory state of exile.

Site Immaterial presents spatial narratives challenging conditions of the ‘illegal’ immigrant, while empowering the migrant self through an interactive architectural projection event. Through civic intervention, a mediated environmental experience provides a physical presence through virtual manifestations to underscore the debate surrounding migratory human rights. Site Immaterial utilizes technological and artistic counterpoints to provide a civic and participatory voice to marginalized migrant communities through experimental media architecture.

Emphasizing the complexities of the migrant condition, Site Immaterial focuses upon issues of exile, speaking to the ‘in between’ state where we negotiate our place in the world, our associations, ideologies and histories of the political in the pursuit of the sovereignty of self. In a world where isolation and connectedness coexist in our ideological and geographical associations, physical and virtual migrations continue to redefine how we construct our identities. Fluidity and immediacy create a dynamic landscape full of contradictions and conflict as well as new universals and mechanisms of unity between difference and singularity.

How we choose to navigate these dynamic set of constructs is determinate to whom and what we are as much as where we have come from and where we are going; and therefore what we are to become.