T4T
LAB
Cronenberg Redux
Invited Distinguished Professor:
Casey Rehm.
Gabriel Esquivel, Studio Professor
Texas A&M University
Team: Collin Stone, Hans Steffes, Luis Romero, Yasmin Soliman.
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.