Media Facades and Newscocoons

[Image: A rendering of a "media facade" in action, in Melbourne's Federation Square; image via Swissnex].

Tonight at 6:30pm here in San Francisco, the fantastic local gallery Swissnex is hosting an event called Media Facades and Newscocoons, "featuring three guests from Switzerland and a Bay Area counterpart."
The participants are:

—Barbara Kummler, a Swiss media specialist with ag4, a "mediatecture company" based in Köln, Germany
—media artist Muriel Waldvogel
—Jeffrey Huang, Director of the Media and Design Laboratory at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland
—Patrick Keller of fabric | ch (and speaker at next week's Postopolis! LA)
—Scott Minneman, interdisciplinary designer and co-founder of Onomy Labs

At the same time, Swissnex will be kicking off an exhibition of Newscocoons designed by Waldvogel and Huang. The Newscocoons are "room-compatible media art pieces of inflatable 'media furniture' that mirror the topics discussed in a subtle but powerful manner." Waldvogel and Huang have also developed the amazing Sentient Ecologies project, "an algorithmically generated housing structure that follows phototropic behaviors of plants and produces instead of consumes energy."
After their presentations, BLDGBLOG will be on hand to moderate a 40-minute roundtable discussion about the implications and future applications of their work.
Here is a map. You are meant to email before attending; if you want to stop by – and please do, as I think it will be quite interesting (and it's free) – please send a note to "media-facades" at "swissnexsanfrancisco" dot org.