fabric | rblg

Whilst we are pretty much all aware of the implications of 3-D printing as a process of making any arbitrary object at the push of a button, it is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

Designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a “provocation” (that’s designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally “grow” the products we use every day.

What is particularly interesting about these future scenarios is where we once thought about computer systems that evolve through immense network of both physical and conceptual parameters, where one influence the other as in the case of Nervous System’s process of “growing objects”, the process of printing may eventually evolve into processes of actual physical growing. These two systems, of digital creation and of the biological one may eventually merge, creating an ecology of both digital and physical networks that communicate and feed of one another.

“One day if we understand how to program [living organisms,] we can encode things beyond software–we could encode materiality” says Carey. “That’s already happening in nature, but we have no idea how to do that ourselves.”

Time to move away from mimicry?

Read more on Fast Company >Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods

More on this topic at syntheticaesthetics.org

Following from Glitch Reality No1 commissioned by It’s Nice That for Nike, Glitch Reality 2 by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and David Gardener is a new iteration of exploring physical objects in glitch form. The process is an interesting one, applying digital methodology to alter physical objects. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez explains:

A tea set was created by purchasing non-matching tea set components, scanning them with a Z-corporation 3D scanner and roughly repairing the digital mesh files. The mesh files are then 3D printed to create an instance of this tea-set data that inherits the glitches from the analogue-to-digital-to-analogue translation.

Also below is short animation experiment Matthew made using a crude 3D scan of his friends baby Harriet.

The meshing algorithm curiously created a caccoon from fragments of scanned baby pram, which inspired the title of the piece.

Continue reading.... Glitch Reality II [Objects]

Via Vague Terrain

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In creating a foundational piece of software infrastructure Ben Fry and Casey Reas have done myself and countless peers a great service and helped launch thousands of arty new-media applets. In Form+Code (F+C) Reas teams up with Chandler McWilliams and LUST design studio to produce a slim introductory text on procedural and code-influenced art and design. While the book makes only the briefest mention of Processing, a good percentage of the work documented in it can be traced directly or indirectly to the platform that emerged from the MIT Aesthetics and Computation work group. F+C also includes historical precedents, from loving documentation of green Cathode Ray Tube Spacewar!, to one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawing instruction cards (presented here as code only — LeWitt's typed out gallery proposal). There are a few other nods to post-minimalism and other pre-P5 projects. Additionally, F+C also breaks out of the screen-based ghetto, including images from proposed and built architectural investigations, art installations, design prototypes and sculptures.

The book itself is broken down into conceptual chapters that explore techniques that are code-like or only practically achievable with code-based tools: repetition, geometric transformation, parametrization, visualization, simulation. Each chapter includes spare descriptive pages which introduce overall themes and very briefly discuss the documented projects. F+C is a fairly no-nonesense machine -- it moves briskly through its functional structure of chapters, never pausing to dwell on any one project or image. Yoshi Sodeoka's 2004 video work based on presidential State of the Union addresses is presented in much the same way that Marius Watz's beautiful software generated abstractions are. Both sit alongside a Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installation, an elegant Cory Arcangle data-vis deconstruction, images of a Morphosis tower project for Paris, news-stream visualizations, and Mark Lombardi inspired diagramming. To some extent all these projects (and many others) are being stripped mined for the illustration of a technique or concept. This undifferentiated treatment of a really diverse set of work and ideas is, for me, the primary weakness of the book.

Even with some notable omissions in the projects covered, there's likely to be a items here most of us haven't seen yet – I discovered many. If you are looking for an overview and introduction, or a catalog of interesting work, Form+Code will be a useful resource. Ultimately, though, it leaves me hungry for a more focused and critical approach to this incredibly interesting subject. It's clear that Reas, McWilliams and LUST would be particularly well qualified to produce exactly that sort of text.

IMAGE: Street Life, a project by The Living (David Benjamin + Soo-in Yang) in association with the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

In his lecture at Sci-Arc last week, architect David Benjamin of The Living presented these wonderful soup bowls, which he and Soo-in Yang designed for the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.

IMAGE: Street Life by The Living.

I’m a big fan of any food that talks to you, whether in the cryptic wisdom of fortune cookies or the logistics-laden transmissions of RFID-chip equipped milk cartons, but these bowls are especially clever. Benjamin explained that the basic idea was inspired by two defining features of South China’s cities: street food culture and the manufacture of electronics.

We designed and fabricated a custom soup bowl with scrolling LED messages hidden inside. We arranged for the curators of the Biennale to write short observations about the city and then program them into the bowls. And we arranged for several dai pai dongs around the city to serve food out of our custom bowls.

IMAGE: Dai pai dong in Shenzhen, via The Living.

IMAGE: Street Life by The Living.

The dai pai dong, or open-air street restaurant, is all but synonymous with Hong Kong cuisine despite government attempts to dislodge them, while across the border in the electronics manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, thousands of assembly-line workers dine daily at dai pai dongs set up outside the factory gates.

In the biennale guidebook, curator Kayoko Ota describes The Living’s custom bowls in action:

Local citizens come to eat their favorite noodles in soup at a dai pai dong. Halfway into the bowl—surprise!—they discover an LED message glowing at the bottom, provoking thoughts about the architecture and urbanism of Shenzhen.

IMAGE: Electronics manufactured in Shenzhen, via The Living.

One of the ongoing goals of the three-year-old Shenzhen & Hong Kong Biennale is to bring the two cities closer together — last year’s organising committee rallied under the banner “Two Cities, One Theme, One Exhibition.”

Meanwhile, chief curator Ou Ning chose “City Mobilisation” as the theme for 2009, urging architects and urban planners to move away from their focus on “the building of physical space,” and instead pay attention to “the social structures, community interests and political realities behind these cities and buildings.”

IMAGE: Street Life by The Living.

IMAGE: Sample messages from Street Life by The Living.

The Living’s soup bowls were a practical and playful means to achieve both goals, by inserting daily micro-messages from artists, architects, and curators in each city into the pre-existing social and cultural framework of open-air street restaurants. Hiding a glowing LED at the bottom of an ordinary soup bowl was an ingenious way to reference the local electronics industry — but, more importantly, according to Benjamin, it “made people stop, look, laugh, and hopefully think.”

IMAGE: Click here to watch this short video of The Living’s Street Life soup bowls in action.

This idea simply seems too good to limit to a two-month biennale.

Admittedly, in other contexts, the bowls would be stripped of their elegance as a reinvention of pre-existing local products — but still, the possibilities are endless! Anxious mothers could equip their university-bound offspring with an LED plate, sending text messages about the importance of a solid breakfast and vegetable consumption at appropriate times of day. Birthday meals could be served with a scrolling subtext of good wishes from long-distance friends and family. Farm-to-table restaurants could surprise guests with a greeting from the person who grew their dinner. Who knows, perhaps Israeli and Palestinian restaurants could even swap tableware to start a spontaneous, mobile-phone enabled dialogue between diners?