Texas A&M University T4T LAB Spring 2017
Invited Professor: Casey Rehm
Team:Collin Stone, Hans Steffes, Luis Romero, Yasmin Soliman
CRONENBERG REDUX
This project demonstrates machine vision as a distorting
mechanism that absorbs and digests information to produce the geometry of a
building that challenges how far data can be br¬oken down and re-understood. In
this case of automated architecture, the sample becomes the bases from which we
entrust machine vision with to reconstruct a reality that it rebuilds based off
of patterns and information that it has collected from our existence. This breakdown and re-structuring of
information ends up accumulating into a data-scape where we are then witness to
a mangled reflection of our own architectural beliefs, and morals as humanity,
in the form of our digital traces that have been chewed up and spat out into
the project you see here. While much of
the buildings output is beyond a conceivable level of complexity, traces of
ourselves and the essence of original samples become readable as an interface between
us and a machine.
When data is being processed to create the building,
information is being pulled from a data base vastly wider that anything a human
could ever comprehend. By nature of
pulling from so much data/information, this creates an architecture through an
inherently additive process of repetitive generation. This manifests in geometry being organized
from the roots of an infinitely dense micro grid, in which the scale of
elements in the building have the ability to shift deeper, or towards the
surface of the grid. Through its metabolism
of data the system removes and negates traditional hierarchy and breaks
information down to its baser part, through the use of this universal micro
grid. The infinite density of the micro
grid forms a framework for the anabolic process of voxelization, the
re-assemblage of data into a cohesive whole.
The re-assemblage of this data creates a shift in hierarchy
that leads to phenomena such as digital misreading, digital imposition, and
digital splice. These re-associative
processes result in the usage of imposed objects such as bananas and strawberry
as definers of space that carve throughout the mass. At certain levels in the heirarchy, elements
such as furnniture become misread by the machine as the splicing of chairs
forms walls and partitions. Traditional
objects and discrete parts start to morph and splice together creating
dismorphic, but recognizable figure through the process of digital decimation,
breakdown, and reformation, much in the way molecular data is spliced in the
Cronenburg classic, the fly.
Cronenburg's philosophical assertion that traces of ourselves are still
recognizable even through genetic destruction and reassemblage aligned with the
assertion that traces of our culture are still readable through the digital
sampling of our previous architectural beliefs.
Though this decimation, breakdown and reformation of data and heirarchy
would seemingly result in the removal of human authorship, the result is a
shift in scale of authorship from the individual to the societal.
