Elizabeth Diller

(Łódź, Poland, 1954)

Artist and architect. She founded the Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS + R) studio in 1981 with her husband, the architect Ricardo Scofidio. During the first decades of the studio's existence they did not construct any buildings. They preferred to dedicate themselves to the design of spaces for performances or to the creation of architectural utopias. For example, the Slow House (1991), a country house where a simple door served as a façade, or the Blur Building (2002), whose walls were delimited by water vapor and which one had to visit with a raincoat. Diller considers his discipline to be “a physical manifestation of social relations.” Reimagines cultural institutions, author of the High Line, Lincoln Center renovation, MoMA expansion, and The Shed performing arts center. In 2017, Diller inaugurated a huge park next to the Kremlin in Moscow. Diller's agency has two very high-profile projects in London: the expansion of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the new headquarters of the British capital's Symphony. In Rio de Janeiro they finish the new Museum of Image, right on Copacabana beach.
He has participated in Medialb Madrid within the framework of the banquet_03 exhibitions metabolism and communication with the work Indigestion. The interactive media installation crosses two electronically linked modes: an interactive video and a virtual environment. The video consists of a dining scene projected on a horizontal dining screen/table which a viewer can join as a guest. An archetypal film noir narrative develops between two characters with an ambiguous relationship sitting at the table; only his hands enter the screen. An adjacent touch screen offers the viewer a selection of characters from a variety of gender and class stereotypes. The viewer can switch dining companions mid-conversation, and while the narrative always moves in the same direction, the multiple branching dialogues are nuanced by each combination of characters. In an adjacent space, a participant wearing a Polhemus motion-sensing device can navigate in real time through the computer-generated, expanded space of the same dining table. The image is split onto two large screens on opposite sides of the room and viewed in 3-D. The moving, zoomed-in point of view across this mega-landscape reveals a micro-drama unfolding in the details.