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USMAN HAQUE
(London, England, United Kingdom)

. BURBLE PROJECT

bur.ble n.: 1. A gurgling or bubbling sound, as of running water. 2. A rapid, excited flow of speech. 3. A separation in the boundary layer of fluid about a moving streamlined body, such as the wing of an airplane, causing a breakdown in the smooth flow of fluid and resulting in turbulence.

Usman Haque is a London based architect and artist with a strong focus on designing interactive architectural systems and is extremely interested on how people interact with each other and with their surrounding environment. He not only develops digital studies, but also the technology and systems to bring his project to physical reality. He has develop and realize several projects among them the Reconfiguerable House, Sky Ear, Evoke, Scents of Space, Haunt, Urban Constellations and Burble.

Burble is a massive wall consisting of carbon fiber rods, Excel D12 high performance sailing rope, latex extra-large balloons (24”-36”), LEDs, sensors, microcontrollers, fishing lock-swivel clips and hard black bamboo. The carbon fiber rods, sailing rope and the black bamboo construct the overall structure for the Burble, from which the main component is attached to. The project is mainly composed of the helium filled extra-large balloons, each containing sensors, microcontrollers and LEDs that create bustling, glowing, and rippling effects on the structure. Another Important component of the Burble it the black bamboo handles which contains microcontrollers that responds to the movement of the crowd holding on it.
The Burble is a project derived from the technology and set rules of Haque, but design, assembles, and control by the participants and the environmental conditions. The initiation of the Burble is designing the overall composition using pentagonal colored shapes in a small scale. Once the composition is attained, it is broken down into manageable modules and distributed among the participants for assembly. The assembling of the burble begins forming the structure of the set composition using the carbon fiber rods and sailing rope. The balloons are then attached along with the LEDs, and microcontrollers to the structure in alignment to the given module. All the modules are then laid and put together to form the overall composition for the Burble. Finally the balloons are inflated with helium while the crow holds on to the handles to keep the Burble in position. The final stage is releasing the massive structure from one end and moving and pumping the handles to ignite the spectacular color lights reflecting in complex patterns on the massive wall. The crown moves side to side, back and forth, push and pull on the handle to see their movements echoing and translating as color up to the entire surface of the wall. Wind also creates movement on the floating wall which is also translated and projected into the wall with color patterns. The Burble sways with sparkling colors and motion transforming a dark motionless space into a bright colorful play of movement. The Burble fuses the

interaction of the people with each other and to their environment.