systems.culture journal
s e m e s t e r 1 2 0 1 3 studio e abpl 90115 university of melbourne chu sin chung adrian 332874
“ Whoever holds the key to programming ends up building the reallity in which the rest of us live. ” Douglas Rushkoff
chapter.one cultural forces
task.a
assessing and collecting
cloud gate Anish Kapoor Millenium Park,Chicago 2004-2005 Stainless Steel
“Through the shine and reflecƟvity of Anish’s work, his pieces have no fixed idenƟty but rather occupy an illusionary space with eastern theologies shared by Buddhism, Hinduism and Toaism. Kapoor creates a conflict between internal and external, superficial and subterranean, and conscious and unconscious through ‘The Cloud Gate’ while exploring a theme of ambiguity.”
What is most striking about this sculpture is the reflec vity of the material. The sculpture is meant to be interac ve, with the reflec vity engaging the public with the city - an aretefact that brings the city closer, where people can metaphorically touch the city scape surrounding them. The curvilinear shape of the sculpture also distorts the reflec on, paralleling this idea that ci es are really adver sed as distor ons of what they really are.
1
s t r e e t s o f philadelphia Bruce Springsteen ‘Philadelphia’ 1993 Themes explored: AIDS Homosexuality Aliena on Anonymity
I was bruised and ba ered, I couldn’t tell what I felt. I was unrecognizable to myself. Saw my reflec on in a window and didn’t know my own face. Oh brother are you gonna leave me was n’ away On the streets of Philadelphia. I walked the avenue, ‘ l my legs felt like stone, I heard the voices of friends, vanished and gone, At night I could hear the blood in my veins, It was just as black and whispering as the rain, On the streets of Philadelphia. Ain’t no angel gonna greet me. It’s just you and I my friend. And my clothes don’t fit me no more, A thousand miles Just to slip this skin. Night has fallen, I’m lyin’ awake, I can feel myself fading away, So receive me brother with your faithless kiss, Or will we leave each other alone like this On the streets of Philadelphia.
“We were dropping like flies, wasƟng away, geƫng all kinds of weird diseases. We died in horrible agonizing pain, someƟmes slowly drowning from the fluids in our lungs. And nobody cared, nobody gave a damn. Every week, another friend got sick, every week, another friend died. Every week end was spent going to funerals and visiƟng hospitals. Our friends were literally vanished and gone.” The song was wri een for the movie Philadelphia in 1993. The song is mainly about AIDS and the people dying anonymously and alienated. Although the focus of the song is not the city itself, the way describes these condi ons paints very vivid images about ci es, dark alleys, people living in poor condi ons and squalour. Overall a very dystopian view of the city. 2
a l l a c u e l g a m i v e s t i d o Frida Kahlo Hoover Gallery, San Francisco 1933 Oil and Collage on Massonite Themes explored: Aliena on Nostalgia Anima Capitalism v/s squalour
The se ng is New York City . Behind are very strong images of New York City the skyscrapper, the river, the statue of Liberty, boats entering the harbour. As we more to the foreground it starts to show squalour, decay and aliena on, the backdrop of ci es. The robbot in the middle of industrial chimneys is a symbol that every body in the city is considered as an un-named cog in this machine that is the city. The main theme used by Kahlo is nostalgia. Although she is in New York because of be er opportuni es, and even though she is physically present, her crea ve soul, her anima, as represented by her dress, is not there. We again see this dichotomy, this contrast between what a city is thought to be and what a city really is.
task.b
transferring motive
a r t p i e c e
For this artwork, I kept exploring the theme of suality and dichotomy inside ci es. Aesthe cally, I think that I have been mostly inspired by Frida Kahlo’s pain ng and used some of her techniques to reinterpret this theme. The artwork takes the form of a digital montage and in it I tried to show this duality that exists inside ci es by trying in some ways to represent both sides of the coin inside a single frame. The composi on of the image shows on the le the happier, shopwindow adver sing and somewhat ar ficial facade that o en charms and excites and engages. I tried to use powerful symbols of ci es, symbols of consummeriem, capitalisms, knowledge and opportunity. In the background, I used the city scape that too o en becomes the iden fying image of ci es. And on the other hand, the other aspect of ci es is a lot grimer. Again I tried to use symbols. The Robin Hood Gardens, one of the most notorious failed urban social housing plans; the factory chimney belching smoke represents all the nega ve aspects of industrialisa on; abandoned streets devoid of life and ac vity. In terms of representa on techniques, I used very vivid colours full of life on one hand, while on the other a very grim and dull treatment. The sky gradient represents that all these contras ng and dual things are happening simultaneously in the same place, at the same me, under the same sky.
chapter.two tooling
task.c
why digital?
fitness
criteria
The city as it is usually adver sed is o en a distorted view of what urbanity really is. It is a place of ambiguity, of contrast, of duality, a dichotomous space where func onal chaos is concealed behind the makeup of a presentable façade. My artwork a empts to encapsulate this atmosphere by throwing everything on a single canvas, where color meets monochrome, where life meets death, where bright meets dark. A place where the sky is both bright and dull, where people have names but no faces. The piece is successful in the sense that everything is depicted in the same space with no par cular hierarchical space arrangements between the chao c and the pris ne. However, it fails to depict that tension, that fragile equilibrium that exists between these 2 en es. Although both sides of the city exist in conjunc on and share the same space, the rela onships that exist between them is a lot more complex and layered than just the idea of shared space. The consumerist façade feeds on the more vulnerable but resilient back and establishes a form of parasi c rela on. An atmosphere of tension of malaise and unease reigns in between, with a tangible tension constantly pushing and pulling the boundaries of social acceptance and tolerance. The artwork would have been more successful if these tensions had been more explicitly depicted and explored. Future explora ons would benefit from such spa al interac ons – furthermore, tension, push and pull, chaos, order, etc. are fairly easy to represent pictorially and spa ally. Every explora on should contain this dual iden ty and stress on the nature of this tension between these two poles. Another aspect of this duality that I would like to explore is not only the sta c arrangement, but also the dynamic movement of life and ac vi es across these thresholds and how this in return morphs the thresholds, and how the resilience and forces of each hinder or facilitate the shaping of the new dynamics.
task.d
flow culling
Through the design itera ons I tried to explore the idea of force to convey the idea of the city background puching through the pris ne facade. All the itera ons try to explore this concept of force.
task.e
abstract affect
Following a discussion we had as a group, we decided that the closest common underlying mo ve behind our fitness criteria was the idea of decay. We both interpreted a form of it in a different way, and decided to further explore it as a group fitness criteria. The first material explora on was to dissolve a block of polystyrene with turpen ne. The ‘decay’ of the polystyrene itself, while being interes ng, did not result into anything that could be used.
However, stretching the so ened polystyrene did create some interes ng decay-flesh like textures that created interes ng pa erns.
The problem with that was that the dissolving process was s ll ongoing and that membrane was extremely delicate. The process could not exactly be stopped and the form frozen. A few seconds a er this image was taken, there was not much le of the polystyrene membrane. A workaround was to take one picture, and use this picture to generate a mesh. The technique that we used was to play with the brightness and contrast se ngs and generate a series of images that that would then be stacked in Amira, a medical imaging program.
original image
generated mesh
We used a similar process with ink, but the dierence was that having a frozen image, for the ink we took around 200 pictures of the ink flowing down into a glass of water and would then use these as stacks into Amira. Only a few samples of the 200 images are shown.
We then had to create a script in Photoshop to automate an ac on that would get rid of everything except the ink trail across all the 200 images that we then stacked into Amira.
The generated mesh is basically a series of sec ons (that represents each image). These two experiments that with Amira have demonstrated us that using images, it is possible to produce a 3D geometry that would otherwise be impossible to get.
Another material explora on that we were looking at was the decay of chalk in vinager. Again, the chemical reac on itself was not so interes ng, but more way the new dissolved physical geometry was converted into a digital geometry. We used a cloud service called 123D Catch by Autodesk. It generates a 3D mesh using a series of photos taken all around the object - basically a subs tute for a 3D scanner. We we very surprised to see how accurate the generated mesh was. And contrary to Amira, this technique of transferring from physical to digital produces a close to exact replica of the prototype, rather than a stacking of sec ons.
task.f
abstract development
The prototyping that we explored did not unfortunately give us a form that we could use for the design of the chandellier. However, they did allow us to explore and understand different techniques and processes that we would hopefully be able to use for the chandellier. Since the most conclusive part of the the material explora ons were the processes, we decided that the process itself would be the beginning and driver of our design. We reinterpreted ‘decay’ as a sequen al decay that would happen at the interface of the different itera ons. The loss of informa on would therefore provide direc on to our design processes. As we were exploring loss of informa on we needed to start with something complex enough, with sufficient informa on so that the processes might have sufficient content to create something interes ng. We agreed to start with a recognisable urban landmark that we would ‘decay’ into something new.
Our group fitnes criteria was as follows: “Architecture has reached a point where ideas are generated using precedents, in which case no completely new ideas are produced, but rather inspired. Our approach was to push this idea to the limit by taking a very recognisable city element and generate forms by using recursive transformaƟons in a series of iteraƟve processes resulƟng in corrupted data and lost informaƟon.”
task.g
chandelier
For the urban landmark, we first thought of using the RMIT Design Hub as star ng point. Our ini al process was to create a model of the building, create voxel subdivisions in the volume in a series smaller ‘cells’ and run an agent-based python script that basically sends a series of agents through the subdivided volume ‘knock out’ the cells, thus genera ng a form of decay. That was a dead end: Subdividing the volume in sufficiently fine grain required around one million cells to be extracted from the model. The grasshopper defini on that was used kept crashing, and the only viable way to make it work was to considerable reduce the resolu on. The agents did not behave as expected. While reviewing the script to try to make it work, we came across a revela on that made us en rely abandon the design hub: We found out that a similar project on the Design Hub had been done previously by a group of thesis students from the university. From there we decided to use an en rely different building, and we opted for Flinders Street Sta on, as we felt that being a railway sta on, it represented very well the urban landmark. In terms of how to decay the geometry, several words came up: parasi c muta on virus and came up with a series of diagrams/ flowcharts to establish the rela onships.
Virus A0 process 1 Vic m A
Symptom A process 2
Virus A1
process 1 Symptom B
Vic m B
Virus A2 errors
light material explort’n
technology decay
rebirth
errors digital interference
flinders street dome
We were considerably struggling with the idea of rebirth and found it quite hard reconciling the idea of decay and how decay can be curated to create an interes ng rebirth aesthe c
During one of our informal crits, Gwyll used a term that immediately clicked and we knew that that was what would unblock our stalemate: CHINESE WHISPER The idea behind the chinese whispers was a gradual and sequen al loss of informa on as a series of processes is being applied on a specific geometry (dome of Flinders Street Sta on). We used our previous concept of digital>physical>digital as the processes at the interface of which these chinese whisper instances would occur. The first step was to obtain a physical model of the fliders street sta on dome. We used a digital model and had to modify it to a certain extent to make it 3D printable, that we then obviously 3D printed.
The 3D print was very bri le and we could not carve/melt it without breaking it (the breaks on the image happened a erwards however.) We therefore had to produce a replica in a material that we could intervene on. The way we did that was to use the 3D print as a prototype, make a latex mould out of it and use the mould to cast a molten molten wax replica.
Before cas ng the wax, we inserted LEDs in an a empt to later add a level of interference while conver ng the physical model back to digital.
inser ng LEDs
latex mould around prototype
mel ng wax
unmoulding
cas ng was
mould
The first interven on that we made on the wax model was to melt it. this broke down the symetry and the remaining of the linearity of the edges of the dome.
Once cast, the LEDs were lit, and 2 instances of the 123D catch process were run. One with the LEDs sequen ally lit, and one with the LEDs o.
The 2 instances resulted in two dis nc ve meshes. While we thought that adding a layer of interference would be interes ng, 3D catching with the LEDs resulted in a mesh that we considered too wild and too blobby to use. We therefore stuck with the close to realis c mesh. The catching process did smoothen some of the blobs on the surface of the wax model, and we then used that mesh as the basis of the 2nd itera on (2nd instance of the chinese whisper).
Instead of 3D prin ng this me, we decided to contour the model to add another level of texture. With the card model, we again ran the same process again (latex + wax)
The experiment was a failure - the prototype was too large and the latex mould too thin and tore during the wax cas ng. To make it water ght, the mould had to be twisted, and the resul ng wax model was extremely deformed, and the catched mesh completely unusable.
From there, we made the decision of rejec ng that itera on and revert back to the previous prototype. We ran another series of similar processes, and the final mould was used for the final chandelier.
The aect that we were trying to achieve was to convey this idea of transience and constant change, not only in the process of producing the final chandelier, but also during its existence as a light producing artefact. To achieve that, we were inspired by a wax lamp by Merve Kahraman:
The idea of the halogen bulb was to melt the wax while in use, so that the form of the chandelier itself is in a constant state of change. The growing stalac tes would therefore be a very important element of the design.
We nted the wax with yellow pigment and inserted a 10W halogen bulb into the molten wax. The purpose of the bulb was not only to generate light, but heat to melt the wax while the chandelier is lit.
A frame cut to the shape of the original dome was also inserted around chandelier to show the star ng and ending stages in a moment of comparison that is important and characteris c to the game of chinese whisper.
chapter.three material affect
task.h
reflection
The main cri cism that we received regarding the chandelier was that, while the idea of chisese whisper was an interes ng one, the changes occuring at the different interfaces were too arbitrary - the geometries that resulted were o en too blobby and shapeless and therefore unusable. This was a very legi mate comment since in the process of producing the chandelier, we several mes ended up wth a mesh or a prototype that we could not use. In terms of the informa on and rela ng directly to the concept of the chinese whispers, the decay only resulted in a loss of informa on, with no effec ve addi on of informa on. There was therefore no reconstruc on, and the reason for this was that we did not possess sufficient technical skill to effec vely implement our design decisions on the geometries and let the scripts/defini ons/program limita ons/ characteris cs to define the final formal outcome. The physical/digital dialogue was a strong point of the process and is something that we would like to carry on with, but do not feel that wax and latex have sufficient material quali es for us to use again for a project on an architectural scale. Chinese whispers is also a concept that we would like to keep, and by extension, star ng with a recognisable, sufficiently complex landmark as the ini al itera on of the process.
task.i
museum of digital arts
For the gallery, we wanted to keep exploring the concept of change and corrup on of informa on, chinese whispers and the dialogue between digital and physical. One of the main problems/mistakes that we did for several sessions at the beginning of this project is that we discussed a lot about ideas of where to start and as to how interprete informa on corrup on, instead of actually doing something.
4. Maze Crea ng confusion inside the maze and offering possible avenues, with each path crea ng a different set of experiences. This was abandoned to the planning complexity and the limited size of the building.
Some of the things we discussed were: 1. The observer effect - basically a quantum physics principle that states that for certain systems, you actually affect the system by observing it. In architectural form, this could mean spaces that generate experiences by observa on. I called that the the fridge paradox - something that can only exist when observed.
informa on
illusion
illusion
A point of order that we discussed and that we thought needed to be impera ve to the design would be that final moment of comparison between the ini al input and the final itera on of whatever change happening. The inputs could be:
observa on observa on 2. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle another quantum mechanics principle sta ng that it is impossible to dertermine to a certain degree of accuracy both the posi on and momentum of a par cle. Increasing will decrease the other. We did not really explore this avenue in terms of architectural syntax/affect. 3. Floa ng point error
1
1.1
1.11
1.111
a sentence a symbol an object an image a sculpture an idea
rela ng to context, ini al thoughts about what we could use were: geometries rela ng to fed square sounds from the street bells of St Paul
The sound aspect was something that we seriously started exploring in terms of recordings at the site under different condi ons ( me of day, density of traffic) and run actual chinese whisper games and turning the audio informa on into a geometry. Apart from basic waveforms, we were unable to convert audio into geometry so we abandoned this idea. Another avenue we explored was a constant artpiece that would recur across the spaces amidst the changing context that would highlight that change. this did not, however, inform us about the spacial affect and planning of the gallery. At this point we pre y much got stuck and started looking at precedent systems and possible materials.
The biggest breakthrough was the iden fica on of the Capitol Theatre as our star ng point. Our choice for the Capitol Theatre is it is an extremely and immediately recognisable space, and because ARM used a a similar process as we were (take a notable landmark and change it) in the design of RMIT Storey Hall. In this respect we were posi oning ourselves along the same lines in the architectural discourse and in a way par cipated in a form of architectural chinese whispers.
Capitol Theatre
Storey Hall
The most interes ng features that we found in the theatre was the ling system, and that was definitely something that we explored more and that we wanted to use for our own project.
Ravensbourne College, FOA
Selfridges warehouse
Tiles by Lithos
Spanish Pavilion, FOA
Soumaya Museum
Villa Nurbs
While looking at materials for les, we came across the architect Joshua Stein who produces digital les through digital technologies and slip cas ng. Slip cas ng is a process that has been used for hundreds of years in the reproduc on of statues. We found slip cas ng interes ng because it can combine modern digital technologies and tradi onal methods of produc on to create les that would otherwise have been impossible to produce.
Tectonic Horizons, Joshua Stein
Night Garden, Ronald Rael
The backbone of the building would be a ribbon that goes inside the building and loops back to the beginning. The ribbon represents the chinese whisper and serves as the surface over which the les will be overlaid and altered. The form of the ribbon itself changes according to the changes on the les.
The actual fabrica on of the les is a 4-step process: 1. The le first needs to be digitally designed. 2. The file is sent to a CNC machine and a prototype is milled out of foam. 3. The milled foam is pressed between 4 pieces of wood that serve as a former. Po ery Plaster is poured inside the former to create a nega ve of the foam prototype. 4. Once the plaster is solidified, slipcast is poured into the mould. The water from the slipcast is sucked by the plaster, leaving a film of ceramic onto the inside of the mould. As the ceramic dries, it shrinks and ‘pops’ out of the mould (possibly with the help of an oven.)
liquid plaster poured
solidified plaster mould
liquid ceramic poured foam prototype
solidified ceramic le wooden former
Our first le itera on was basically the le from the Capitol Theatre. To create change, we produced a slip cast version and 123D Catched the le (similar to the chandelier. We then used a python script to a ract that mesh onto a ‘mould surface’ (digital version of cas ng?). The results were very inconclusive as they resulted in the same kind of shapeless, blobby geometries that we were cri cised for in the previous project.
We therefore decided to take a step back and look at the star ng peinciple of the chinese whispers. We realised that in the game there is actually a reconstruc on of meaning (if somebody does not understand a mumble, he will reinterprete it and say a close sounding word instead of repea ng the mumble.) The mumble can be an analogy to the blob, and instead of transferring the blob, we decided to make informed design decisions to reconstruct the geometry. To do so, we ran a few instances of actual chinese whisper in an a empt to iden fy the mechanics that generate that change:
The building iden ty resided in the ornament The building iden ty resided in the tournament reuins iden ty started at louis iden ty stuff side and you start It’s shocking banal and plagiarism It’s shocking the nile and plagiarism It’s shocking and Ireland played as It’s driving me selec ve shopping Struggling the selected shopping It’s shocking banal and plagiarism Extrac ng those that are great Straggling closed hotel group Badly closed hotel group That closed hotel room addiƟon subtracƟon exaggeraƟon simplificaƟon subsƟtuƟon
The first le starts with a hexagonal footprint and and uses a simplified version of the geometry of the le from the capitol theatre. The le is then divided and rotated to produce the second le. The hexagon is then divided into a series of kites that are arrenged linearly, then rearranged into a penrose pa ern (reference to Storey Hall). The nega ve space created by the penrose is then used to create a new ‘circular’ le which then merges back with the penrose pa ern. The penrose then meets another version of rhombus-and-kite le whose surface of morphed using a catenary grasshopper defini on (gravity is a reference to the physics used for slipcas ng). The surface of the les becomes increasingly curvier and that curvilinearity is exagerrated on the last le to really emphasize the change that has occurred as it loops back and meets the ini al le in that final moment of comparison.
I designed a few rela vely simple grasshopper defini ons to array the les over the surfaces. The diďŹƒculty was that for surfaces with varying u’s and v’s, the spacing between the subdivisions varies for at mes the tessela on does not happen perfectly.
We managed to work around that by iden fying parts of the surfaces that were narrowest and made the tessela ons happen there. What would happen was that on wider parts of surfaces, the les do not interlock, but do align. The result was areas where the les are less densely arranged but s ll in a certain way ordered. It was not the ini al intended arrangement, and this might appear to be post ra onalisa on, but owing to technical constraints, that was an acceptable compromise. We tried to build into that by crea ng a ‘forest’ of rods from which the les would be hanging and which would be visible from between the les.