[Springs via Causa Locuta on Vimeo]
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Non Volatile Variations
[Non Volatile Variations]
Variations with too much predictability. The random generators driving the variation are not producing enough volatility because the operations for which they are inputted are not properly building iteratively on the previous stages.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Disordered Networked Flow
Disordered Networked Flow
Following Yiannis Chatzikonstantinou's work with form-finding in emergent networks - Ive been experimenting with early grasshopper particle systems. Parametric [post-] processing of the animated particulate flow begins to extract organizational principles which could be interpreted to inform and choreograph circulation within buildings or urban morphologies.
This particular sketch employs Daniel Hambleton's SPM Vector Field Integration component and Giulio Piacentino's Shortest Walk components within grasshopper.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Lighting Tests
[image sampling play]
[lighting test]
A rather buggy first attempt at an image sampling script. It is part of an ongoing mapping project that is simultaneously about building correlations to data and artifacts of downsampling procedures with information in parametric models. There is a half-formed idea of loneliness and mystery re-emerging in the dehumanizing play of precise and explicit data. As we build datasets that correlate and reference multiple sets of inputs and processes through assemblages of multiple integrated operations we start to experience a decreasing relation to predictability and and increasing emergence of ghosts in the machine. One of the questions is how we start to pick our way through unfamiliar landscapes that result from the critical hyperextension of human technique through digital technologies. How do we follow way-finding procedures and myths and turn these into habits to gain comfort with the unfamiliar? (mis?)recognition and habitual motions? A surpression of the strange? A luddite cordoning of a territory? To what unexpected mutations do we expose ourselves? How will we tell the story to our children decades from now?
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Form: Partial Figures
[a sketch towards a partial theory of form]
Architectural attitudes about form generally arrive as more or less direct [and simplistic?] translations from whichever philosopher[s] an architect is reading in a given decade...
Ideas of substantial form in Plato or Aristotle [morphe - form - as opposed to hyle - matter] are appropriated as an infrastructure for ancient through medieval compositional methods. Unity, clarity, and proportional relationship of parts are derived from metaphors of the body. The mathematics of extrinsic forms in nature are appropriated as examples for architectural composition.
Rene Descartes' challenge to substantial form in philosophy, often characterized as a mechanical model, introduced an analytic geometry in place of the analogic geometry of proportions of classical architectural thought. When combined in the 20th Century with theories of the assembly line and the managerial regime [Frederich Winslow Taylor], a Fordist modernism was birthed which was absorbed across political lines of Capitalism, Soviet Socialism, and even National Socialism in Germany. Economic Production was God, and the scientific management of production drove the relevant architectural thinking on form. [Albert Speer's architectural production might at first glance appear to be a rear guard return to substantial form, but his most important production which was the choreography of the Nuremberg rallies was a sophisticated Taylorist orchestration]. This paradigm translated into a modernist anti-form, or a thinking of generic, identical, and extensible space in contrast to figure. Superstudio famously paradied this idea, by attempting to over-extend the managerial space towards a totalizing system. Peter Eisenman describes one line of escape in the conflict that Le Corbusier develops between generic extension of the grid, and dynamic partial figures animated by subjective movement through space as well as alternating moments of centrifugal and centripital forces within his projects.
<aside>
Jacques Derrida delivered a wildly significant assault on form and identity from the domain of literature, which nevertheless can mostly be seen in retrospect as a still-birth in its architectural version. By identifying with literature and the text as the way of accessing the world, de-constructive thought largely failed to access the political and the forces which give rise to form. Barthes' search for a degree zero resulted in a more critical architectural anxiety which drove architects towards a questioning of the most basic building blocks of architecture. Eisenmen and Tschumi's approaches towards finding a deep structure of form prior to significance remains highly relevant to the crafting of architectural objects. [Jenck's and Venturi took Post-modernism as an excuse to pander to a cultural conservatism and, along with their associates have discredited the semantic degree-zero.]
</aside>
In his 1988 book Le Pli (The Fold) Deleuze breathed new popularity into Leibniz's dynamic physics and theories of the object. In contrast to Descartes' rigid brand of modernism, Leibniz's fluid rationalism re-appeared as a sharply distinct counter-thesis that appealed strongly to designers. Following Greg Lynn, 1990s architectural thought focused on the use of animation software appropriated from the Film Industry to primitively model the philosophy of time and event in architectural terms. Advanced architectural thought at this time proceeded from the degree-zero experiments of Eisenmen's process architecture and began to introduce Computer-Aided-Manufacturing methods. This advance moved architectural working drawings from symbolic objects, intended to convey methods of assembly to contractors, in the direction of operative drawing. This newly direct relationship of design visualization software to manufacturing methods has resulted in a rupture that has opened up in real terms, a path out of the Taylorist production as a primary determinant of architectural form. Toyota's success with its Just-In-Time Production System [developed between 1948-75] is often cited as a fundamental rupture with mass-production and a move towards mass-customization. This returns us to the question of what we are doing formally with the object currently.
The digital avant guard remains obsessed with single celled organisms and small populations at the scale of the petri dish which are simulated as particle or agent systems within virtual physics models [http://theverymany.com/, http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/]. This is highly relevant [or at least fashionable] scientifically, but falls rather short of the complexity of the architectural assemblage. As the current generation finds its voice, it is important to return to the half-completed projects of Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache with the far more developed toolkits we have on the table twenty years later. The move towards informal disintigration, while interesting, is taking too long to achieve a high level of formal differentiation and cohesion.
[Agenda]
The sketches collected here are part of an experimentation which takes some guidance from Eisenman's search for deep structure within architectural grammar. We are developing procedures by which to move from point to curve to surface to volume within the toolsets of emerging graphical algorithmic editors (grasshopper) which will allow us to critically interact with this generic topological geometry at each stage of its formation after the manner of the 1990s animation experiment. By associating the parts of an architectural assemblage in a relationship based model, we can begin to expose these to information/signals from datasets or simulated environments, such as physics models or structural analysis packages, or from arcGIS formatted mappings. The methods by which we build these relationships is the focus of this study of the explicit history of the object. Discussions of formal development in animal genetics, especially at the embryonic stage, as well as cybernetic theories of signals/information within biological and mechanical systems are strong conceptual material to draw from as we develop these procedures.
Architectural attitudes about form generally arrive as more or less direct [and simplistic?] translations from whichever philosopher[s] an architect is reading in a given decade...
Ideas of substantial form in Plato or Aristotle [morphe - form - as opposed to hyle - matter] are appropriated as an infrastructure for ancient through medieval compositional methods. Unity, clarity, and proportional relationship of parts are derived from metaphors of the body. The mathematics of extrinsic forms in nature are appropriated as examples for architectural composition.
Rene Descartes' challenge to substantial form in philosophy, often characterized as a mechanical model, introduced an analytic geometry in place of the analogic geometry of proportions of classical architectural thought. When combined in the 20th Century with theories of the assembly line and the managerial regime [Frederich Winslow Taylor], a Fordist modernism was birthed which was absorbed across political lines of Capitalism, Soviet Socialism, and even National Socialism in Germany. Economic Production was God, and the scientific management of production drove the relevant architectural thinking on form. [Albert Speer's architectural production might at first glance appear to be a rear guard return to substantial form, but his most important production which was the choreography of the Nuremberg rallies was a sophisticated Taylorist orchestration]. This paradigm translated into a modernist anti-form, or a thinking of generic, identical, and extensible space in contrast to figure. Superstudio famously paradied this idea, by attempting to over-extend the managerial space towards a totalizing system. Peter Eisenman describes one line of escape in the conflict that Le Corbusier develops between generic extension of the grid, and dynamic partial figures animated by subjective movement through space as well as alternating moments of centrifugal and centripital forces within his projects.
<aside>
Jacques Derrida delivered a wildly significant assault on form and identity from the domain of literature, which nevertheless can mostly be seen in retrospect as a still-birth in its architectural version. By identifying with literature and the text as the way of accessing the world, de-constructive thought largely failed to access the political and the forces which give rise to form. Barthes' search for a degree zero resulted in a more critical architectural anxiety which drove architects towards a questioning of the most basic building blocks of architecture. Eisenmen and Tschumi's approaches towards finding a deep structure of form prior to significance remains highly relevant to the crafting of architectural objects.
</aside>
In his 1988 book Le Pli (The Fold) Deleuze breathed new popularity into Leibniz's dynamic physics and theories of the object. In contrast to Descartes' rigid brand of modernism, Leibniz's fluid rationalism re-appeared as a sharply distinct counter-thesis that appealed strongly to designers. Following Greg Lynn, 1990s architectural thought focused on the use of animation software appropriated from the Film Industry to primitively model the philosophy of time and event in architectural terms. Advanced architectural thought at this time proceeded from the degree-zero experiments of Eisenmen's process architecture and began to introduce Computer-Aided-Manufacturing methods. This advance moved architectural working drawings from symbolic objects, intended to convey methods of assembly to contractors, in the direction of operative drawing. This newly direct relationship of design visualization software to manufacturing methods has resulted in a rupture that has opened up in real terms, a path out of the Taylorist production as a primary determinant of architectural form. Toyota's success with its Just-In-Time Production System [developed between 1948-75] is often cited as a fundamental rupture with mass-production and a move towards mass-customization. This returns us to the question of what we are doing formally with the object currently.
The digital avant guard remains obsessed with single celled organisms and small populations at the scale of the petri dish which are simulated as particle or agent systems within virtual physics models [http://theverymany.com/, http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/]. This is highly relevant [or at least fashionable] scientifically, but falls rather short of the complexity of the architectural assemblage. As the current generation finds its voice, it is important to return to the half-completed projects of Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache with the far more developed toolkits we have on the table twenty years later. The move towards informal disintigration, while interesting, is taking too long to achieve a high level of formal differentiation and cohesion.
[Agenda]
The sketches collected here are part of an experimentation which takes some guidance from Eisenman's search for deep structure within architectural grammar. We are developing procedures by which to move from point to curve to surface to volume within the toolsets of emerging graphical algorithmic editors (grasshopper) which will allow us to critically interact with this generic topological geometry at each stage of its formation after the manner of the 1990s animation experiment. By associating the parts of an architectural assemblage in a relationship based model, we can begin to expose these to information/signals from datasets or simulated environments, such as physics models or structural analysis packages, or from arcGIS formatted mappings. The methods by which we build these relationships is the focus of this study of the explicit history of the object. Discussions of formal development in animal genetics, especially at the embryonic stage, as well as cybernetic theories of signals/information within biological and mechanical systems are strong conceptual material to draw from as we develop these procedures.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Process: Crossed Signals
[Crossed Signals]
[Signals Un-Crossed]
[Signals Un-Crossed Higher-Resolution]
[Volume From Line]
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Transcriptions: 3 Strands
[6 intervals of 3 strings relaxing gradually.]
Kangaroo is a particle physics modelling component for Grasshopper that Daniel Piker is writing. One early example of its capacities is a catenary solver (which is becoming a common test problem to demonstrate nascent methods of digital form-finding). Kangaroo has potential as a rudimentary way to sketch structural behavior/failure.
While accurately reproducing physical interactions is useful, these tools invite the modelling of imaginary rather than realistic physical forces. Static geometries begin to act out the desiring impulses that they inherit from their instructions.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Transcriptions: 5 Moments
Dimitri Stefenescu has developed an implementation of agent based behavior based on numerous previous experiments descended from the classical Reynold's Boids.
[5 moments generated in rhino+grasshopper with Dimitri's patch]
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