DirtyGeometryStructure

Atlas of Convection: Dirty Geometry Pavilion 1

Atlas of convection

night emissions

Liquid Numbers

The series of drawings as part of the gallery exhibition Natural and Artificial Behavior is from various investigations of physical simulation and purely algorithmic geometr/topology. The first drawing, with the help of Brad Rothenberg who is working on the funicular script, from a network topology study that we did for a Tower design. Basically I was looking at two types of algorithm for a network topology with specific geometrical expressions. One is a seed condition in which as lines are constructed between points, the net constantly updates and reorganizes its geometry step by step. In another version, I was looking at a different algorithm for connecting the points all at once. This is a field condition and the difference in computation is that i unleas a set of different rules on the same field of points, and each system generates a different geometrical outcome. The second drawing I did with the help of Mat Howard who is working on a network topology script from Cellular Automata rules. This is rule number 10 and the interesting feature of this computational system is that as the recursion of the rule continues, the network becomes more and more baroque. Basically it moves from rectaliniearity to curvilinearity through the increase of information and recursion. The last drawing i did uses computation in a completely different way, it uses computational fluid dynamics to generate a membrane based on a geometrical primitive that is subdivided into various regions. This is computation in its most "calculus" like guise, that it is, it is computation as a means of truncated heavy calculations to relate particle to particle and particle to field conditions. As I keep making these drawings for the show I become more and more interested in the issue of the natural and the aritifical. My friend Jon randomly asked me about the Olympic Stadium and wondered if i was interested in the soap bubble geometry. Well, that's really not soap bubbles but rather voronoi, which is algorithmic and topological. But like the physical computationa of soap bubbles it works with inputs and outputs where the system updates itself for minimal pressure. Basically I am interested in phsical and algorithmic forms of compuation to produce various kinds of geometrical expression, or just to invent certain types geometry that i can use in architecture and design. Everything in a sense is about the organization of information -- what is interesting is how that happens around pressure, in both physical and algorithmic computing.

Descartes Wax 3

Descartes Wax 1

The first set of Experiments i did in about 2003, just when i was finishing my PhD and working on problems of turbulence. I started a series of conversations with Philip Ording, a math student from columbia about calculus. I was interested in two things, the internal geometry of things -- meaning, how matter has specific geometrical tendencies -- as well as different ways of generating new geometries and new behaviors. I had at that time been reading a lot about calculus and the relation between mathematics and events. There was an important parallel with what I saw in connection with Stoic philosophy and the ontology of events. I was giving a lecture at Penn on Crunk Geometry -- goemetry that somehow fucks up, isn't smooth. It actually happend because i had a dent in the hood of my car that was really smooth and i tried to fix it, but it popped back with this think like a Crunk. so the first experimetn was to repeat that with paper and then a piece of wax, to make a crunk, and then smooth it out with a kind of calculus like incision (the stoics had an interesting notion about the ontology of things and that was that events are more "real" than things -- see emile Brehier on the cut). But i became fascinated by the reorganization and the folds. I also had a intern at the office and we began to play with ways of making turbulence. the wax pieces that followed were from problems of convection, assymetry, and the Rayleigh number -- a dimensionless number (unlike gravity) at which matter begins to reorganize itslf geometrically.

Descartes Wax

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One of the primary interests of the office is the interest in matter and geometry -- the ways in which matter can be organized, or disorganized. For a number of years i've been playing with this material and looking at problems of turbulence. turbulence is an interesting problem because it can't be fully calculated -- that is, there is no forseable moment in the future when the full dynamic state of turbulence can actually be calculated. What we have are algorithms to simulate, or truncate, the behavior. But there is another reason which is that the turbulence is an effect of the geometry of matter and energy relations. It belongs to a kind of catasrophic moment and the reogranization of matter. The pieces are developed through a process of convection. We think of them as portraits of matter. This stretches the analogy a bit, but it essentially means portrait of the behavior of matter. In the 5th meditation, Descartes is toying with this problem of flux and instability. The cogito is that moment in intellectual history when a phenonmenon is fixed -- i can doubt everything but that i think. In connection with geometry, we hear a lot about the Cartesian grid and its arresting of phenomena -- that it is static, etc. We hear this a lot in architecture. Its really a kind of stupid point. Descartes didn't invent the grid per se, but rather a coordinate system. This coordinate system transformed the very nature of geometry since it could now be submitted to algebra. Without this, we know, there would be no calculus. so the Cartesian wax is in a sense this kind of obsession.

Portrait of the office as an artist

The series of videos explores the relation between the random and the specific through an algorithm that takes the original footage of discussion and recombines the statements - ad infinitum. The premise is a kind of dilemma about portraiture and the conventions of portraiture. Although the discussion ranges from Rembrandt (was he doing self-portraits?) to biometric readings and identity theft, the potential for various statements to appear through the algorithm is an important part of maintaining a tension between random and specific behavior. The portrait is both "natural" insofar as it is of a unique organic subject and highly "artifical" insofar as that subject is posed. If I take a random picture of someone or a group of people, its not clear in what sense that is a portrait. But if somehow frame, as Lea put it, a negotiation (and remember, she's French, so the term is loaded) between the artist and the subject, i have a highly specific moment. The most interesting moment of this exploration occurs during the Baroque when Northern artists begin to explore the relation between the artist/viewer and the subject. Rembrandt, Franz Halls, Velazquez and others constantly experimented with ways of introducing both a random event and a highly specific moment. There were certain social and cultural as well as economic forces that contributed to this, but one of the most important among them was the rise of a professional class and the previous iconoclasm. Artists were no moving toward a more secular set of activities. Mixed with a resurgent interest in the nature of phenomena there is an incredible "Meditation" on the flux of life from Chardin's boy blowing bubbles to Vermeers interiors. Of course, it is also precisely at this moment that be begin to see a different interest in the relation between mathematics and phenomena -- the invention of calculus and the inroduction of rates of change. Mathematics now being capable of describing not just positions or objects or relations, etc., but also Events -- meaning, rates of change.
In this sense one of the curious outcomes is the relation between information, pressure, and matter. the portrait is in many ways the attempt to capture the rate of change in its infinitesimal quality, the barely perceptible. The portrait seems like a natural subject in art. I mean, it seems like something that would be inherent in art. But it really isn't like that. Roman portraits had very specific legal and political functions. And they changed dramatically from the Republican to the Imperial period.