Final Work

"Sin_k" (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmKwJXFzoaI

the notated abstract.

"If the primary stuff of music is sound, which I believe, then notation, no matter how ordinary or idiosyncratic, is no more than a representation of the real thing.

Furthermore a description of notation such as this is a symbolic representation of a symbolic representation - twice removed from reality."

Lejaren A. Hiller, Jnr

[sourced from John Cage's Notations (link to PDF of book)]

Fractal Links + others

FractalAbyss

P:0 / site

Genr8

LandonGray - fractal plugin

L-System Plugin


Voronoi Diagrams:

These kinda act like waves interacting with slightly submerged objects.
Mathematica

Voronoi Algorithms


Architecture Students:

Southern California Institute of Architecture

Notation as a Tool of Thought - Kenneth E. Iversion

Notation as a Tool of Thought - pdf

This guy won an award for this lecture.

Ready to Go!

OK. I think I am finally ready to begin experimenting from the research. I have narrowed the focus down to a few select areas, and shall start modeling and coding tomorrow.

Wish me luck! :)

The Architecture of Nature - ebooks

Here are some of the books on mathematics in nature and architecture that I am looking into. Have been playing around with mel scripts from the first book.

Algorithmic Architecture - Kostas Terzidis - pdf - Brilliant book. Includes mel scripts.

The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants - P. Prucinkiewicz, A. Lindenmayer - pdf - From the guy who coined the term 'L-systems' [Linenmayer-systems] comes a book that decodes the creation of plants using mathematical algorithms.

On Growth and Form - D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - pdf - Huge book that analyzes how organic forms are created in nature. Now in the public domain.

Enjoy.

Contemporary Dance Video Database

Contemporary Dance Video Database

Field - a development environment for making digital art

- Created by "The OpenEnded Group" -

Description taken from the site:
[link]

Field is a software project initiated by OpenEnded Group, for the creation of their digital artworks. It is an environment for writing code to rapidly and experimentally assemble and explore algorithmic systems. It is visual, it is hybrid, it is code-based. We think that it has something to offer a diverse range of programmers and artists.

Further description:
[link]

Field is a development environment for experimental code and digital art in the broadest of possible senses. While there are a great many development environments and digital art tools out there today, this one has been constructed with two key principles in mind:

Embrace and extend — rather than make a personal, private and pristine code utopia, Field tries to bridge to as many libraries, programming languages, and ways of doing things as possible. The world doesn't necessarily need another programming language or serial port library, nor do we have to pick and choose between data-flow systems, graphical user interfaces or purely textual programming — we can have it all in the right environment and we can both leverage the work of others and take control of our own tools and methods.

Live code makes anything possible — Field tries to replace as many "features" with editable code as it can. Its programming language of choice is Python — a world class, highly respected and incredibly flexible language. As such, Field is intensely customizable, with the glue between interface objects and data modifiable inside Field itself. Field takes seriously the idea that its user — you — are a programmer / artist doing serious work and that you should be able to reconfigure your tools to suit your domain and style as closely as possible.

I'm going to look into the software... see if it would be useful for my project[s].

Art of Limina: Ambiguity in Space

This artist [Gary Hill] has created works which demonstrate spatial ambiguity.
Defining dimension and depth is difficult.

Links:

Slought.com exhibition listing, including audio file link:

Art of Limina: Gary Hill

An essay on Gary Hill's work:

Up Against Time - pdf

Movement Notation

As I shall be choreographing motion, I feel it necessary to research what forms of notation for movement already exist.

Here are some links:

MovementWriting

Movement Notation - with free lesson upon sign-up.

Labanotation
- Laban Software

Action Stroke Dance Notation - brilliant codes for notating dance. Extensive descriptions and tutorials.


Benesh:

Benesh Open Source

Benesh main site
- Benesh Notation tutorial


And here's a brilliant thesis by Dr. Royce Neagle that appears to have extensive research in applying notation to animation or digital format:

Emotion by Motion: Expression Simulation in Virtual Ballet - pdf

Algorithmic Choreography with William Forsythe & Paul Kaiser

An interview with digital artist Paul Kaiser talks with choreographer William Forsythe about the potential of computers and algorithms for the future of dance choreography.

Here's some excerpts:

William: So I began to imagine lines in space that could be bent, or tossed, or otherwise distorted. By moving from a point to a line to a plane to a volume, I was able to visualize a geometric space composed of points that were vastly interconnected. As these points were all contained within the dancer's body, there was really no transition necessary, only a series of "foldings" and "unfoldings" that produced an infinite number of movements and positions. From these, we started making catalogues of what the body could do. And for every new piece that we choreographed, we would develop a new series of procedures.

Some choreographers create dance from emotional impulses, while others, like Balanchine, work from a strictly musical standpoint. My own dances reflect the body's experiences in space, which I try to connect through algorithms. So there's this fascinating overlap with computer programming.

For Eidos, I gave my dancers and myself the following general instruction: "Take an equation, solve it; take the result and fold it back into the equation and then solve it again. Keep doing this a million times".

Paul: That’s where your focus on spatial procedures and the architecture of movement maps so well onto computer algorithms and virtual spaces. As you said before, it’s as if we’re all on the same quest.

William: How do you define that quest?

Paul: Shelley and I have spoken about it as the search for a new art form, which seems about to emerge from this odd confluence of the dance, visual art, and computer worlds. I imagine that in this new form, performance and recording and notation ‘ three strands of the performing arts that have always been separate ‘ will be fused. So that you can have the notation shaping the performance, the performance shaping the recording, the recording shaping the notation, and so on. Perhaps this new process, which builds on itself, can bootstrap a new way of making art.

William: Where I’d start is with the score. What’s been missing so far is an intelligent kind of notation, one that would let us generate dances from a vast number of varied inputs. Not traditional notation, but a new kind mediated by the computer.

I found the interview through this blog.

Rhythmic Subdivision

I'm looking at ways in which I can incorporate subdivisions of rhythm

• Pitch and Relational Anatomy


• Subdivisions in Anatomy and Music Notation


• Form-making Subdivisions


• Emotion in Architecture

Metaphors on Death - Conscious Weather

Observations on the weather and it's relation to my Grandmother's passing.

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Saturday - Gloomy -

The Death of the Conscious Mind

Sunday - Pristine -

Visitations

Monday - Cold and Breezy -

The Death of the Unconscious Mind

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Left Leaving <--- a poem I wrote in 2006.
It was a reflection on the past. The first piece I had written in 9 years.

Death - A Reframe On Transition

Healing through Connections - strength in numbers

Death and the Ego - the ego's response to death. Experiencing loss.

Community Response - communal love and support

Change is Nature

From Ratatouille (2007):

Django: [showing the exterminator shop to Remy with the dead rats in the window] Take a good long look, Remy. This is what happens when a rat gets a little too uncomfortable around humans. The world we live in belongs to the enemy, we must live carefully. We look out for our own kind, Remy. When all is said and done, we're all we've got. 
Remy: [Django starts to walk away] No. 
Django: What? 
Remy: No. Dad I don't believe it. You're telling me that the future is - can only be more of *this*? 
Django: This is the way things are. You can't change nature. 
Remy: Change is nature, Dad. The part that we can influence. And it starts when we decide. 
Django: [Remy turns to leave] Where are you going?
Remy: With luck, forward.

Source

Cross-Catalytic Architectures with Cecil Balmond

Featuring Cecil Balmond, Peter Jones, Peter Davies, David Ruy, Jenny Sabin

Tuesday, December 5, 2006 at The Slought Foundation www.slought.org

"The architects and scientists featured in this event conduct research and design projects that join architecture, science, and pedagogy. Their work develops according to “cross-catalytic” relationships in which their practices affect and are affected by each other. In this sense, the interdisciplinary nature of the work is becoming more than just a metaphor. Catalysts accelerate the rate of change in a system; they intensify a process. Nobel-prize winning Chemist Ilya Prigogine has described catalysis as agents “that modify the reaction rate without themselves being affected.” Cross-catalysis slightly alters the role that agents play in the catalytic process, such that all parties are involved in a dynamic interrelationship. Feedback loops emerge as disciplines develop new methods of research and practice. This event has itself been organized to reflect new models for the organization and dissemination of information that are emerging today, and will feature a series of short presentations followed by a public conversation. The event will build upon recent work by the Non-Linear Systems Organization group at the University of Pennsylvania (under the direction of Cecil Balmond) and the Penn/CMREF Center for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (under the direction of Peter Lloyd Jones).A predominant idea in popular culture, and even within science itself, is that the DNA blueprint or genome can autonomously generate a complete, self-organizing being, with a distinctive form and function: here is the code; here is life, complete with all of its complexities. Models borrowed from architects--such as tensegrity structures--have led to radical new insights into how vivisystems, like the genome, are assembled and function, as well as to a new understanding of the extracellular matrix or cytoskeleton in the cellular structure. Similarly, models borrowed from biology, particularly regarding self-organization and the emergence of complex, non-linear global systems from simple local rules of organization have led to radical new forms and structural organizations in architectural design. Examples such as these demonstrate how attentive architectural and scientific practices can be to each other--particularly within architecture and biology which are constantly challenged to reinvent themselves in a manner similar to the historic avant-gardes or in the face of new technologies."

Blogs and Sites

Architectural Design Students:

Digital Fabrication
Digital Fabrication - Summer
Deep Ornament as Assembly Process
The Size of Your Brain

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Graduate School of Architecture

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Blogs:

BLDGBLOG

Fractal Ontology: Politics, Cybernetics, Philosophy

Emergent Perspectives:

http://slought.org/content/11421/

Script Resources:

Script Editor
Scripting wiki
Script writer's website

Architecture Student Wiki:
Course Material Library

The Power of Symmetry:
SYMMETRY

INSPIRATION:

Pruned - check data structures

http://www.dataisnature.com/- brilliant articles and links to books.

We Make Money Not Art

Rice Gallery, Houston, Texas - Check the Rip Curl Canyon

The Shape of Music

Deleuze and the use of genetic algorithm in architecture

Biothing.org

www.colinkeefe.net

http://www.mh-portfolio.com/indexH.html

Ecology: Emergence in Form-making - Architecture and Biology

Where Architecture Meets Biology: An Interview with Detlef Mertins (2007)

All indented quotes are from the interview (except where specified otherwise).

One of the ideas that comes to the fore at that moment is that form is not an a priori; it's not predetermined. Form is seen as the result of a process. That opens the door to the question of what kind of processes and media or means are involved in the making of form."

This reminds me of Alfred North Whitehead's ideas presented in Process Philosophy, where strings of 'actual occasions' or momentary events cause the illusion of an 'object', which suggests that in fact, there is no objective reality. Actual occasions of micro-phenomena (sub-atomic particles, atoms, cells) collect and self-organize to form 'societies' - rocks, human beings, trees etc - thus giving the illusion of the physical and objective.

I wrote on my other blog about nominalisations, where I suggest a rejection of the noun - which is static and uncreative (left brained motivation); instead opting for turning everything into a process, a verb. Thus, the rock becomes rocking; the tree becomes treeing; the life becomes living. This opens one's options. A question may be asked in two ways - the closed sort which influences one into giving a nominalised answer:

"What is your name?"

... or the process equivalent:

"How is your name?" (abstract, change this into more correct english...)

The brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor was able to witness a complete de-nominalisation of her reality processing (Deleuze/Guattari would perhaps describe this as a process of deterritorialisation). She had a massive stroke which allowed for her to observe her brain faculties shut-down systematically and sequentially. The left brain functions of beliefs, identity, form, Chronos and ego disintegrated leaving the right brain functions intact: creativity, oneness, freedom, eternity, interconnectedness... the universe as an interconnected organism. Humans as parts that make up the organism - like the rock is a process of connecting together snippets of time and space/form.

Whitehead argues that “organism” is a better term for things that exist. Whereas matter is self-sustaining, externally related, valueless, passive, and without an intrinsic principle of motion; organisms are interdependent, internally and externally related, value-laden, active, and intrinsically active. link

So likewise, any form that is created by an organism should be ecological to the system. A form that adjusts to ever-changing environmental conditions. The form as an ecological organism.

I think Mies [van der Rohe] understood the building as an organism that is at work within its milieu or environment. Just as life forms evolve, so too do architecture and technology. For Mies, architecture needed to achieve a new harmony with its environment, because the environment had been changing in historical and material terms.

So architecture that is caring for its environment and inhabitants, buildings that maintain both themselves and their surroundings. As humans maintain both their internal processes and consciously respond to external stimuli, architecture may also step into the role of consciousness. We are beginning to see this type of behaviour inside the virtual world - web applications and browsers that respond to behavioural themes of users. The web is showing evidence of organism-like characteristics. Internet communities emerge with rules that no single person created, yet the rules appear to be ecologically sound.

It is the phantom space between forms that create the order. The imaginary lines that connect two points; a neuron fires another neuron which creates a thought string; two bodies that come together to reproduce and create other forces, a string of actual occasions. An evolution through cross-cultural and cross-matter interaction. A fresh and creative universal harmony; the biosphere realised.

[Austrian artist-designer Friedrich Kiesler] defines co-realism as the science of the exchange of relationships and forces, which emphasizes the dynamics of continual interaction between humanity and the environment, in which there is little or no distinction made between the natural and the technological.

Forms that are created through genetic engineering.

And he says we shouldn't imitate how nature constructs things; we should be developing what he calls biotechniques that allow us to influence life in a desired direction. For instance, he wants to move from the assembly of structures to continuous construction.

To move beyond the potential of human form and expression, to a cybernetic type thinking of form-making; a creative, synergistic evolution:

Kiesler wants to develop "the potential of specific actions contained in any nucleus of human physiology, resulting in entirely new functions sustained by inventions." This set of ideas still uses the ecological model of the human organism in its milieu, but now stresses the interactive, dynamic, and inventive dimension of that relationship. Interactions taking place in society, technology, art, every sphere of activity - this is a holistic notion of interactivity. Through interaction, it's possible for us to expand.

Lissitzky, 1924:

"Every form is the frozen instantaneous picture of a process. Thus a work is a stopping-place on the road of becoming and not the fixed goal."

Interactivity produces form:

Haeckel is the person who coined the discipline of ecology, as the study of the interrelationship between organisms and their environment. Organisms are also understood to be building their environments. They're making the environment while the environment is making them.

Crystals - Self-Ordering - not Self-Organizing (organisms)

Form (previously concrete, with defined outlines) - now (in modernism), form is seen as ambiguous, open; conditioned by the environment and interactions/relationships within that environment. In this sense, the modern understanding of form is philosophically contiguous to Animism.

The modern form is non-egoic; it is empathetic and responsive - concerned with ecology and context.

Sculpture doesn't have to have uses, at least not traditional sculpture, other than to inspire and amuse and provoke in its reception. The reception of architecture is in its occupation and performance as well as in its perception. The challenge is to put aside either-or thinking and develop habits of mind that are inclusive. I think interactive art has many lessons for architecture in this.

There's lot of potential, also, in integrating intelligence to make buildings that are responsive. At Penn, Ferda Kolatan is leading an effort to do that, as he has in his own work. All this is on top of the more effective engagement with uses and programming that we've talked about already.

Global warming demands that we take responsibility for other interactivities than we have talked about so far. There is no reason why more buildings can't be generators of energy, rather than just consumers. Why not integrate that goal into the next generation of generative models for design?

That's actually a good bridge into the question of urban dynamics - how architecture can contribute to the growth and development of cities and economies. In a lovely book by the late Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (2000), she describes how economies grow, develop and expand using an ecosystems metaphor. She says it's helpful to think about how energy passes through ecosystems, what kind and how many transformations of energy and matter take place. In desert ecosystems, less happens than in well-developed forest ecosystems. In a desert or a parking lot, sunlight heats things up but doesn't get circulated much and basically disappears. In the forest, energy is circulated in a web of teeming, interdependent and interacting organisms, plants and animals. It's not just converted once but many times, combined and recombined, cycled and recycled, passed around from organism to organism. That's how diversity, intricacy and complexity develop. The flow of energy, she says, is "dilatory and digressive," leaving behind complex webs of life. It's worth thinking about how the design and making of buildings can enrich ecosystems -human as well as natural - by circulating and recirculating energy. Literally in terms of the energy they use or produce. If they produce energy, not only will this offset global warming, but that energy can be sent into the world to circulate more and in more productive ways.

It's time to radically expand the sphere of interactivity and effects that architects engage, to become serious and activist on that front. We need to develop inclusive habits of mind, to embrace the so-called real world, and work towards attaining multiple goals. There are many issues and resources that can be harnessed and brought together with experimental form-making; it's a tremendous horizon. Without bringing all that together, it seems to me that pure, disinterested experiments in form are inadequate to the tasks that face architects today.

Ecosystem simulation

Ecosystem simulation in Houdini

Bioconstructivism > Biosynthesis - Emergent Architecture

Emergent Architecture, Bioconstructivism, Biosynthesis

I like this description of emergence, taken from EMERGENT Architecture: (company)

What is Emergence?
In the scientific sense, emergence refers to the process of deriving new and coherent structures, patterns, and properties in a complex system. Emergent phenomena occur due to the pattern of interactions between elements of a system over time. Emergent phenomena are often unexpected, nontrivial results of simple interactions between simple components. What distinguishes a complex system from a merely complicated one is that some behaviors and patterns emerge in complex systems as a result of the patterns of relationships between the elements.

An emergent property or behavior is shown when a number of simple agents operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. A system made of several things can host properties which the things themselves do not have. For instance, consider water (H20): hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) are extremely light gaseous substances at room temperature, while water, the effect of their combination, is a heavy liquid. Liquidity is therefore one of the emergent properties of the system of hydrogen/oxygen. There is nothing about the property of liquidity-- its wetness, hydraulic dynamics, Brownian motion, and potential for heat exchange-- that can be predicted by examining the properties of either H or O.

Emergent properties can arise not only between things in a system, but between other emergent properties. The number and subtlety of these properties can be very much greater than the number of things.

An excerpt from EMERGENT's 'about' page:

EMERGENT’s approach is informed by contemporary models of biology and systems theory as well as the arts, toward an architecture based on structural pattern formation and emergent behavior. The work is part of a larger contemporary movement in architecture referred to by Detlef Mertins in 2004 as “Bioconstructivism,” where a bias toward material intelligence begins to produce an architecture characterized by its variability and responsiveness to local forces.

The work questions the dialectic of excess and efficiency in architecture, in favor of a more complex understanding of both through biological thinking. The recursive process of random mutation and natural selection in nature provides a model for how a dynamic feedback between excesses and efficiencies can create innovation and elegance. This feedback logic is executed in the office using both generative and analytical algorithms as well as hands-on design techniques.

Key to the work is the phenomenon of ‘emergence’ which offers insight into the way apparently Isolated bodies, particles, or systems exhibit group behavior in coherent but unexpected patterns. The animated beauty of emergent organizations, such as in swarms or hives, points to a range of real architectural potentials where components are always linked and always exchanging information, and above all, where architectural wholes exceed the sum of their parts.

Here's a link to a project where the medicine department is collaborating with the design department:

LabStudio 07/08 : Nonlinear Biosynthesis, University of Pennsylvania

Lars Spuybroek Architect / Designer - Bioconstructivism

1. Works
2. Teachings