Open_Sailing at the Barbican, 2009 August 27th, Cesar Harada & Hiromi Ozaki

Cesar Harada and Hiromi Ozaki recently presented the Open_Sailing project at the Barbican London, as a part of the Radical Nature exhibition curated by Francesco Manacorda, with a strong emphase on the social aspect of Open_Sailing rather than on the engineering of the object. A serie of engineering videos should follow this winter, to explain the physics behind our project. That day, Frank Gutzeit (Collaborator with Wolf Hilbertz) also explained the technics to grow artificial coral reefs with metallic structures and electricity in the sea, as a commercial product called Biorock.



Here is the 30 minutes long video presentation of Open_Sailing, original file (333 MB quick time file), flash version (91MB .flv), also on vimeo, dailymotion, sevenload, youtube 1 2 3 :



You can entirely see the slideshow here : http://tinyurl.com/OS-Barbican, and also download the 13 MB .pdf of the presentation here.

We insisted in particular on the transformation of our social structure, and how it was a very recent collaborative model :


Usually projects like wikipedia, youtube, facebook, twitter end up in the same web 2.0 denomination, both Hiromi Ozaki and I believe they are very distinguishable.
Some of these collaborative framework are "playgrounds" where anything could happen, where on the other hand you have very "directed experiments", focused collaboration, usually heavily moderated and censored.
Open_Sailing is in the middle, it is a playground that self organises into groups of interest and production groups.
What is also so exciting about Open_Sailing is that this socially atomised, re-configurable structure is validated in both the social organization, and in the real architectural object, the process and the product.

Hiromi Ozaki also wrote a japanese article about the event.
A Mermaid also attended this event, she also made a wonderful article about the Radical Nature exhibition ...