Of all the projects being presented at this year’s New Forms Festival, few will fulfill the event’s mandate as well as Hypercube, a collaboration between Paris-based 1024 Architecture and a number of Vancouver artists. And in part, that’s because few other organizations are as well-aligned with the festival’s aims as the French company, which specializes in new forms that exist simultaneously in the physical and digital realms.

Cofounder Pierre Schneider says 1024 Architecture’s mandate is implicit in its name. “Basically, all the info is there,” he explains, on the line from the never-more-appropriately-named City of Light. “We are mixing architecture—real construction stuff that you have to build in the real world—with 1024. And 1024 is a pixel resolution: it’s a basic resolution ratio. When you make digital projections, all this stuff is 1024 pixels. So we’re mixing real centimetres with virtual pixels.”

Having Vancouver play home to one of the company’s projects is a bit of a coup. Schneider and his partner, François Wunschel, have been winning a lot of attention in both the art and architecture worlds: in 2006, 1024 Architecture designed the French pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; earlier this summer, it presented its spectacular MAD-Orb DJ stage at a Pier 84 rave in New York City.

Intended to add cornea-searing quantities of visual glamour to an electronic dance music performance, MAD-Orb embodies its creators’ fascination with hybrid forms. Its crystalline structure is the visual equivalent of the algorithms used in the production of electronic music; likewise, the blasts of light it
emits are synced to the electronic performer’s synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines.

“We love to mix all the media,” Schneider stresses. “Basically, we are architects, but we play a lot with digital media and all this stuff. And of course electronic music is another medium that we love, and love to mix with. For us, sound and music are part of our contemporary environment.”

Engaging with that environment is another aspect of 1024 Architecture’s work. The company is particularly interested in the kind of architectural theatre that charges a public space with multiple layers of meaning, as exemplified by ABIES-Electronicus.

“It’s a contemporary Christmas tree,” says Schneider. “When we did it last year—for Christmas, of course—we did it in the centre of Brussels, which is a patrimoine mondial, you know, a World Heritage Site. So we like this contrast of super-contemporary objects in front of super-old and historical places and buildings.”

Hypercube—a 10-metre-cubed sculptural stage equipped with 49 MIDI–controlled, motorized lights—was originally conceived as a site-specific installation, but 1024 Architecture’s yearlong efforts to find an appropriate outdoor venue in Vancouver came to naught. “We had a lot of discussion for nothing, in a way,” Schneider says. “But it’s never for nothing, ’cause it was really, really exciting to meet all these Canadian artists.”

Local participants include architect Innes Yates and artists Cedric Bomford and Reece Terris, who’ll construct Hypercube to Wunschel and Schneider’s design. The structure will then house a mixed-media performance called Live/Work, the details of which are still under wraps. Schneider apparently wants to keep the element of surprise on his side, although not all of the surprises will be reserved for the audience.

“It’s the first time we’ve made this project; we’ve never done it before,” Schneider notes. “So first, when we arrive, we will see what it looks like and then we will have to learn how it can work—how to train it, you could say.

“We have a simulator here, and simulation on the computer screen is really useful, but it’s never like the real thing,” he adds. “I hope that we will be surprised by it. This is our aim, in a way: to be surprised by our projects, to go ‘Oh, wow!’ when we see it live. If it’s surprising, it’s a good project.”