AIR Grid: Aristippian Structures

Throughout the duration of the festival, Team AIR Grid will construct and exhibit a family of AIR Grid structures. The work will be made and shown at the University of Westminster's Marylebone Campus. The process will be open for public viewing and participation at specified times across the duration.

AIR Grid is a soft, animated lattice woven from embroidery thread into a support frame. It gives rise to stimulating optical effects where spatial boundaries appear animated, change direction, dissolve and re-emerge. The dynamism of AIR Grid is not in the AIR Grid itself but in the eyes of the beholder: when a person looks into an AIR Grid what they actually see is their own psychophysical processes at work.

This year Team AIR Grid will follow the advice of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus and work with geometrical figures, circles, squares and triangles. According to Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture (see the introduction to book VI) Aristippus believed knowledge of geometry was one of the best things humans could have, mainly because of its indestructibility. As Aristippus put it, geometry is a property and resource ‘of a kind that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.’