Circulatory Pathways

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator, creating circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings.

Circulatory Pathways

Sarah Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings. Gestural manipulation of interwoven instruments alters the contours of surrounding architecture. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change.

Collaborations: EPFL Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID), EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS), among others.

N-03X67

N-03X67 is a pneumatic network created by the artist Sarah Oppenheimer that encourages human interaction with EPFL Pavilions’ glass structure.

Buildings are intelligent systems. Like living cells, their boundaries mediate flow. N-03X67 is a dynamic network intertwined within this existing metabolic relay. Sited along EPFL Pavilions’ glass façade, seven elongated pneumatic instruments subdivide the glass wall. Interwoven within and between façade mullions, networked pathways are set in motion by human touch. An architectural array tips and turns in response to human action: sliding a horizontal bar tilts its vertical counterpart. Operating at atmospheric pressure and activated by touch, human energy extends across architectural space.

Linked by air, N-03X67 is a pneumatic network composed of actuators, cylinders, valves, and dampers. Its kinetic permutations were generated in collaboration with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL. Informed by the laboratory’s research on neural networks and learning algorithms, a computer code was developed to optimize routing between actuating instruments. A complex Boolean logic mediates analogue flow. Sliding an instrument directs air along a set of circulatory pathways, creating loops of cause and effect.

N-03X67 embodies the material potential in an energetic circuit. As flow is routed and re-routed, new sensory encounters emerge. An intimate, tactile energy radiates from building to body to machine, blurring the boundaries between viewer and actor, human and mechanism, interior and exterior, public and private.

Sarah Oppenheimer

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings. Gestural manipulation of interwoven instruments alters the contours of surrounding architecture. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change.

Oppenheimer’s recent solo exhibitions include Sensitive Machine (Wellin Museum of Art, USA 2021), N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland 2020), S-337473 (Mass MoCA, USA 2019), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts, USA 2017), S-281913 (Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA 2016), S-399390 (MUDAM Luxembourg 2016) and 33-D (Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland 2014). Oppenheimer’s work has also been exhibited at ZKM, the Baltimore Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Mattress Factory, the Drawing Center, and the Sculpture Center. Oppenheimer is currently a senior critic at the Yale University School of Art.

Sarah Oppenheimer website