The Image Made

One of the Keeper+Instigator shells. The problem lies in surfacing the point clouds of the tentacles, massive cleaning.

Scratch that and Bake it Again: a Revision

 

This structure inherent everywhere becomes the all-consuming drive of the organism; to collect, compile an addendum of surroundings, a DNA database. This organism would be the lab assistant of Carl Linnaeus or Ernst Haeckel. Without any database the organism is limited to its seed volume. Only through the acquisition of DNA from others does it have a method of defense, feeding or survival. Within its own system, the hierarchy of information would determine what form it would take in any given situation. The organism is now a Keeper. It becomes the guardian of life itself, storing elemental data in preparation for nature's eventual obsolescence. Its brain is a hybrid of a left/right brain capability and that of an octopus. An octopus actually has two brains, one that controls its motor skills, directing the eight extremeties. While its second brain directs its survival.
  

Transmittance would occur with touch. Through a two-way osmosis, the Keeper releases nano particles into the organism as a tracking device, this link serving to transmit new skills the organism would be constantly acquiring. In return the Keeper collects both a DNA sample and a steady stream of data referencing the organism's fight for survival. Information is stored closest to the seed within. Layers of DNA are fused in thin films of mother of pearl [twice as strong as any high tech ceramic]. A product of self-assembly, the shells around the seed are formed in a sac of sea water. Surrounding the sac of water is the malleable body of the Keeper, shedding and appropriating the various forms found within the surrounding environment.  Its tentacles allow for efficient travel on both land and water. A hierarchy of exterior shells is shed or appropriated in definition to each enviromnet. A wet swamp will preclude a fin extrusion, etc.

As part of any environment, the Keeper cannot simply exist without a consequence upon its context. Like Cerebrus, the two headed guardian of Hades, the Keeper communicates with the Instigator. The Instigator operates on a nano-scale by accelerating evolution. It does so by injecting a mutation within an organism's DNA, thus constantly altering the environment. The same method of transmittance is used by the Keeper. By brushing up against or touch, mutations are disseminated into the expecting organism altering its genetic code. The Instigator reads the same stored data as the Keeper, the end result to modify the data and modify the organism. The environment is altered positively or negatively. Trees grow knobbly brances, Lily pads turn flourescent, Banyans grapple with each other to extremes.

 The organism is in constant flux to suit its environment, it is a hybrid of a hybrid of a hybrid...  Hence the shape has been a sticking point. I always imagined it form-less. The everything and nothing of Universality. However for the purpose now, the above form is how the Keeper and the Instigator are conjoined; sharing a unit of data, reading the seed differently. 

 

Image from RampantBycicle

The Image Maker

New Technologies/Methods [and learning them] is perhaps my favorite aspect of Architectural Education. Last week I got in touch with the individual that runs the Arius 3D scanner at UCL. Mainly used for Archaeological and Art History conservation purposes, he sometimes gets the random Bartlett student in for a scan. The last being scans of chicken bones. He informed me that the DAS clay model was perfect because white or off white was the ideal surface for working with. I have a few pictures below of the scanning process, sans flash and on my camera.















It is a rather large machine essentially directing light into a mirror triangulated with light passing through a lens. If both streams to not connect then the scanner reads nothing, as in spots with shadow or pitch black. The end result is a point cloud model. I was hoping to have a 3d model ready in a couple of days however the files are so incredibly heavy due to the data per sq cm that Rhino kept crashing.

Connecting the points to form a surface is proving to be difficult as well. However i have found that with a point reconstruction set, a Delauny Triangulation will work to form a mesh that needs further cleaning.

Will post renders in the future.

The Bouncer as a prototype

Hercules capturing Cerberus. 

For the purpose of this project the two headed Cerberus is ideal as a model for an organism that survives based on an input and output [Keeper and Instigator]. Both halves share the same source of energy and information found within the core of the seed.

Information is stored closest to the seed within. Layers of DNA are fused in thin films of mother of pearl [twice as strong as any high tech ceramic]. A product of self-assembly, the shells around the seed are formed in a sac of sea water.

Ingredients

These are just a few images that have been floating around in my studio, sparking ideas for the Keeper & Instigator. Thinking about why the Jellyfish or Octopus as a form are so popular when mechanics marries design brings to a conclusion efficiency.  Their shape is pared down to body and extensions which is a form perfectly suited for any environment.

Images from FFFFound

Image from Screendrafts of Matrix movies for the Sentinel robot

Image from FFFFound

Image from SpaceCollective.
Project taking Gregg Lyn's form and supersizing it into lifescaled architecture.

The Food Critics

Within an operational sense how the organism works was a big question: thinking thoroughly how it disperses within an environment, how it collects surfaces [shedding, suction cups, bio mimicry]. So far it is an "it". Where does it come from, a thistle as a generator. The energy comes from the seed. Will the seed bring forth an animal or a hybrid?
[looking into robot prosthetics to model the mixture of mechanics with a living tissue as part of an animal; if a starfish could regenerate a bionic arm instead of skin and bones]


Setting the form aside [the form seen in photographs below], the naked idea is an organism that can live in three basic environments, born out of the concept of hierarchy. This structure inherent everywhere becomes the all-consuming drive of the organism; to collect, compile an addendum of surroundings, a DNA database [remember Peter Postlethwaite in Aeon Flux, a guardian of a library in the sky that held the living memory and of every human being]. This organism would be the lab assistant of Carl Linnaeus or Ernst Haeckel. Without any database the organism is limited to its seed volume. Only through the acquisition of DNA from others does it have a method of defense, feeding or survival. Within its own system, the hierarchy of information would determine what form it would take in any given situation. The survival skills of a shark would take precedence over that of a seal. The organism is in constant flux to suit its environment, it is a hybrid of a hybrid of a hybrid... The organism is now a Keeper. It becomes the guardian of life itself, storing elemental data in preparation for nature's eventual obsolescence. 

Transmittance would occur with touch. Through a two-way osmosis, the Keeper releases nano particles into the organism as a tracking device, this link serving to transmit new skills the organism would be constantly acquiring. In return the Keeper collects both a DNA sample and a steady stream of data referencing the organism's fight for survival. Information is stored closest to the seed within. Layers of DNA are fused in thin films of mother of pearl [twice as strong as any high tech ceramic]. A product of self-assembly, the shells around the seed are formed in a sac of sea water. Surrounding the sac of water is the malleable body of the Keeper, shedding and appropriating the various forms found within the surrounding environment. 


As part of any environment, the Keeper cannot simply exist without a consequence upon its context. Like Cerebrus, the two headed guardian of Hades, the Keeper communicates with the Instigator. The Instigator operates on a nano-scale by accelerating evolution. It does so by injecting a mutation within an organism's DNA, thus constantly altering the environment.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rupert Sheldrake deals with memory ["the basis of memory in nature....the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species."] and Morphic Resonance. MR  is defined as a pattern within organisms determined not by their prescribed natures but by repitition.
..."it is not at all necessary for us to assume that the physical characteristics of organisms are contained inside the genes, which may in fact be analogous to transistors tuned in to the proper frequencies for translating invisible information into visible form. Thus, morphogenesis fields are located invisibly in and around organisms, and may account for such hitherto unexplainable phenomena as the regeneration of severed limbs by worms and salamanders, phantom limbs, the holographic properties of memory, telepathy, and the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them."

The Interacting Multifarious Guest

 

 

 

Lost Under the Table

This image was a first pass at rendering in 3D studio max. Needless to say the elementary nature of the render is useless and have begun working on a different render approach entirely.

The Multifarious Guest

     

Three Guests Change their Clothes

swamp: the important aspect was to show the above & below of the swamp environment. The two point persp. allows a magnification which is offset by the large Banyan trees which stress a vertical growth towards their roots. Banyan trees as organisms are fascinating, they double back and shoot roots to the ground, there is great potential for manipulation as shelter. *Oppressing trees is trendy in Architecture schools.




cliff: a redrawing of the first cliff idea. Continuing with the focus on verticality and sheer drop of the ice floes [inuit relocating to cliff faces bypassing the melting glaciers], playing with the possibility of either hanging structures or actually interfering withthe volume of the cliff by digging perpendicularly.




forest: splicing the view of the forest into canopy and roots. The canopy is a mode of filtration and shelter. A heirarchy existing between a macro and micro scale. The leave is a cyclic filtration at the micro scale while the trees form a collective macro filtration system. Playing around with the Fibbonacci sequence which is found in nature, is the growth of trees truly random or is there a pattern governed by reason. With the opposite view the roots and bark offer a layering of systems. From the tree's own bark as a layering over time to the idea of tree rot. A diseased tree will expose its innards while leaving the bark caseing. The Human Pappilo Virus may present itself as a growth of roots on a human's hands and feet. The virus hijacks the immune system and orders skin to grow gnarly and root like.

Notes on a Napkin

Picnic: what leads most the discussion are ideas about duality.

swamp: with the opposition of above-beneath --> what is present is the idea of decay and putrefaction. Swamps are commonly known for their darkness either figuratively or literally. Either things disappear or get stuck then disappear. Ideas of camouflage with any organism that lives IN the swamp.

From: Dark Eden: The Swamp in 19th Cent. American Culture by David C Miller

"Europeans long had feared and despised uninhabited and uncultivated landscapes. Besides their obvious dangers, such 'desert places' were thought to be ugly and evil. Assisted by an aesthetic revolution in eighteenth-cent Great Britain, however, urbane antebellum Americans took romantic delight in certain wild places such as mountains and forests. Yet swamps seemed neither sublime nor picturesque and thus retained their age-old negative connotations. In the years following the Civil War Americans sought out these newly aestheticized exotic landscapes, particularly in Florida and the Mississippi Delta."
- Miller presents the romanticized view of the swamp environment in history. This is the immediate vision we have, where hierarchy establishes decay and growth , not unlike any other environment. A horizon divides and organizes the swamp, the need for survival dictates that organisms pass through the water's surface inhabiting both the land and the water.

cliff: moving across the surface perpendicular that is itself perpendicular to the surface of the earth. Just like in the swamp, hierarchy is established but vertically relating more so to the forest than the swamp.

[Image & Article from Abitare]



[Ice Age Landscapes in Lower Manhattan]
* what a fantastic viewpoint, collapsing a subterranean wormhole with the Big Apple skyline behind the overhang. Almost as if two points of view were photographed at once without a two point perspective.

forest: After walking around this year's Frieze Art Fair this Tokyo painter caught my eye. Amongst the plethora of quickly made banal art work, his large scale forest was so peaceful. Little irridescent daubs of paint made up the entire 4m wall and cleverly the spatial treatment was to reverse what happens in real life. Meaning trees became negative space while empty space became this compendium of lavender, rose and pearl hues.

First Three Guests

The Cliff:

• The ecology of the cliff as seen in the Antartic. Alaska, with melting glaciers.

• Reality of the Inuit having to relocate due to their environment melting and becoming unstable.
• Like a domino effect the melting of the Polar Ice caps leads to effects elsewhere --> coastal zones (California, Florida & seasides) will slip underwater.
• With the cliff itself the sheer sides can provide a dwelling. Ie: rapelling and hanging pads.
• challenging the verticality of a cliff in a perpendicular manner like the Anasazi who live inside the cliff.
  

The Swamp:

• Idea of above/below --> Florida swampland where only the ghost orchid grows versus danger of alligators pikes and snakes.
• mire/stuck/heat/floating/heiarchy
• the Swamp was the end result of Hurricane Katrina breaking levees: --> Military Hydrology
• cult movie: The Swamp Thing . 1982
  

The Forest:

• Environmental canopy - shade
• ground dwellers - live in roots on forest floor often without sunlight
• canopy dwellers - rotate from tree to tree oftentimes not even going to the ground at all
• Large net where several scientists live for months documenting the Amazon or in Madagascar
• hierarchy within the verticality similar to cliff
• a collection - repitition forms the whole
  

Table for Nine

curiosities within Architectural practice...

I. The opportunity to combine dissonant principles. ie. Politics, Economics, Social theories, Technology...
II. To walk the line between what exists in our immediate reality and what might be possible with a sprinkle of fiction.
III. Within a project to reuse - recycle concepts that feed back into a project to either strengthen or provide innovative solutions.
IV. To think locally instead of globally, although collectives are important.
V. Parallels between Cuisine and Architecture.
VI. The "Marxist" thought: ie. the where? & why? of things rather than accepting pure face-value.
VII. Translation between emotions or the ethereal into reality - the grounding.
VIII. Experimenting with reuse - recycle of materials, waste and existing conditions.

IX. Multiplicity