Gattegno, Nataly & Johnson, Jason Kelly

Bio Sketch

American-based design partners and educators (Nataly Gattegno, b. 1977, Greece; Jason Kelly Johnson, b. 1973, Canada), founders of the experimental design and research studio Future Cities Lab (operating globally out of San Francisco and Athens), and of the successor public-art practice FUTUREFORMS. Since collaborating from the early 2000s (sources date the partnership variously from 2003–2005), they have produced award-winning projects "exploring the intersections of design with advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, responsive building systems and public space." Both teach at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, where Johnson has coordinated the Digital Craft Lab. Their built installations — Lightswarm, Datagrove (ZERO1 Art and Technology Biennial, San Jose), Murmur Wall — are the chapter's exemplars of the "urban campfire" and the sentient surface.

Key Works

• *From ambient environments to sentient spaces* (2018) — Ch. 20 of Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader: the Banham–Superstudio lineage and the Lightswarm/Datagrove/Murmur Wall programme.
• Lightswarm (2015) — interactive light installation: sound-sensing facade as "a large-scale urban sensor"; "an artificially intelligent facade – a smart surface that can sense, compute, respond, and interact with its surroundings" (discussed in the 2018 chapter).
• Datagrove (2012) — ZERO1 Art and Technology Biennial, San Jose: "a social media whispering wall" aggregating local trending Twitter feeds (discussed in the 2018 chapter).
• Murmur Wall — "an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking, and feeling," with public "whispers" as a graffiti-like override (discussed in the 2018 chapter).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with these authors that have pages in this wiki:

• sentient-spaces
• microevent-microenvironment
• multiple-interiorities
• the-campfire
• interactive-architecture
• atmosphere
• ambient-conditioning
• event-space
• privacy

Relevance to the Core Research

Gattegno and Johnson give the wiki its data-era interior cluster a second genealogy to set beside the digital-fabrication strand (Anderson & Lovell-Anderson, Manack, Carraher): not the fabrication of interiors but the sensing of environments — Banham's campfire and "un-house" recovered as the precedent for responsive urban surfaces, Superstudio's energy grid as the substrate of contemporary life, and interiority itself redefined as gradient ("multiple and overlapping interiorities… at a various scales"). For the everyday research area they add the infrastructural register: the installations harvest exactly the everyday's contemporary media (trending feeds, search terms, passing sounds), making the wiki's communicative-capitalism and privacy questions spatial. For the spectacle cluster, Murmur Wall's whispers — the public's ability to tag and override the representational surface — are a rare built experiment in resisting the spectacle's retransmission from inside the medium.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (2018) — the chapter in Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader: the sole wiki source from Gattegno & Johnson to date.