T4T LAB Spring 2018. Rough and Saturated
Invited Professor: Nate Hume
Team: Sophia Kountakis, Kendall Slaughter, Sami Simmons, Kira Elkins
Undecidable Texture
This project argues against the strict
binary oppositions of the alien and the familiar to explore strange while
working in the realm of both/and. Value is found in the both/and by the
alteration of formal normatives to establish a new allure through the agents of
hybridized materiality, field and figure, and interior/exterior relationships.
New materials are created by misreading the results of physical casting tests
and translating them in to a hybridized texture map with recognizable forms of
canonical architectural materiality. Texture’s ontology becomes a intermediary
for estrangement and familiarity.
The project also diverges from
traditional figure/ground or figure/figure relationships. Instead, the ensemble
operates in terms of figure and field. Field behavior is not seen in a
traditional sense such as some examples argued in Stan Allen “Field
Conditions.” The fields do not follow a Cartesian grid; furthermore, the object
does not simply insert itself into a field either. The interaction between
field and figure is instead dependent on its undecidability between a static
and kinetic relationship. In one instance, field objects depend on the geometry
of the figures as a guide for its path. Other times, field directions
completely disregard existing geometry as a boundary
The grounding, posture, and form of the
major masses in the ensemble work with the various field objects in
encapsulating and framing an exterior figural void space which we have termed
“the three-dimensional courtyard.” Its presence exists not in a definite
outside of the object but a moment of in-between capture a moment of this
un-fixability. The space is not organized in the classic sense of objects
surrounding a void, but instead establishes a new type of interior/exterior
relationship.
Issues
in today’s nutrition problems stem from the defamiliarization of humans to
nature, ie obesity, food scarcity, un-sanitary manufacturing/production
practices. The program of Food Science in this project is seen as a transitive
object in an autopoietic machine that contains both nature and cultural objects
without strictly centering the human. This autopoietic machine challenges the
traditional notion of pastoral agriculture and maintains a constant state
transformation due to multiple agents; the courtyard, as well as the ground
condition that suggests an ungrounding from object to landscape, and the
transformation of raw materials into something new through research. This
transformation is represented through an aesthetic regime inspired by El Bulli
and its initiative in exploring food as an object that is subverts formal
function. Food is no longer produced for human convenience and commodity, but
is now able to explore an unmarked territory of aesthetics.
