JB1.0

"If one wants to dance on a tightrope, one has to first tension the wire."
Siegfried Ebeling, Space as Membrane (1926)

JB1.0: Jamming Bodies is an immersive installation that transforms Storefront's gallery space into a laboratory. The installation, a collaboration between science fiction artist Lucy McRae and architect and computational designer Skylar Tibbits with MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, explores the relationship between human bodies and the matter that surrounds them.

Combining the plasticity of mutable organisms with the rigidity of architectural forms, JB1.0 brings architecture and its subject into a single space. A breathing, morphable wall, JB1.0 animates the building enclosure by absorbing and expulsing the atmosphere around it while compressing the bodies with which it interacts.

JB1.0 is the first iteration of a research project that explores pneumatic architectural skins and their potential applications to the future of health, fitness, science, technology, fashion, furniture, and zero gravity. Through this exhibition, Storefront for Art and Architecture becomes a hybrid between playground and lab space to test questions of scale, geometry, and temporality in relationship to the shape, size, intensity, and quantity of particles that comprise physical structures.