Care Protocols is a mixed reality installation for the XII Architecture Biennale São Paulo. It provides a hybrid digital-physical interaction space that is connected to the act of cleaning. In this space the most common cleaning devices, namely brooms, act as objects of dual nature. When taken by visitors, they become a magic wand for sweeping the floor filled with virtual rubbish. Care Protocols questions the notion of technology and development as a disruptive force and asks if we can associate it with the notion of maintenance, which deals with cyclicity, care and regeneration. As Mierle Laderman Ukeles notes, “some amount of both are necessary, but development is routinely valorised, while maintenance goes unrecognized - because it has no part in progress.” By alienating and gamifying usually invisible maintenance actions, the installation aims to become a playful act of human engagement in our ever-changing and digitally enhanced environment.

Credits:

• TT Professorship Digital Fabrication
  Kathrin Dörfler
• Romana Rust
• Ryan Luke Johns
• Alexander Nikolas Walzer