apomechanes
computational design studio | 2009-2023
instructors & collaborators: Ezio Blasetti, Danielle Willems, Francois Roche, Camille Lacadee, Stephan Heinrich, Dave Pigram, Roland Snooks, Zoupas Dimitris, Perry Hall, Daniel Widrig, Giorgos Sachinis, Eirini Alexiou, Dionysia Daskalaki
participants:
Our speculative condition is that computation is not solely digital but omnipresent.
As such, beyond the correlation of simulation, this seminar positionsdifferent mediums onto a flat ontology and mines the collateral effects of
the synchronicities and divergences between them. The primary territory
of feedback between abstraction, matter and narration is pattern. We seek
novel patterns of organization, structure and articulation as architectural expressions
within the emergent properties of feedback loops and rule based
systems. Computational creations and specifically algorithmic architecture
require a new ethics towards the work. While designing a system and a field
of results instead of a single entity, it becomes a combinatory problematic on
a meta-level: which processes are compatible to be codified together? How
to orchestrate highly expressive phase spaces? Which abstract logics of selfreplication
are capable of infinite amounts of difference?
The success of this speculative and open-ended research is measured in the
expressivity and pluralism of the phase spaces they produce as well as their
architectural translatability. The results fold onto the next projects both by the
means of exhaustive catalogues and in the creation of multi-authored and
open source computational libraries. These ‘languages’, as they escape the
digital inscription to include other artifacts, sometimes notational and other
physical and material, are always-already multiple, collective and non-linear.
Form and Algorithm will run primarily under Python programming language
for Rhinoceros 3D & Grasshopper. The application of python as the
cross-software coding platform opens up a new set of possibilities for the
development of cutting edge techniques of digital representation, abstract
and spatial organization as well as intricate geometric precision for robotic
fabrication. Form and Algorithm will test python for rhinoceros in an intensive
format and will seek to produce innovative intersections between advanced
explicit modeling and algorithmic logics. This seminar will accommodate
both introductory and advanced levels. No previous scripting experience is
necessary. It will consist of a series of introductory sessions, obligatory intensive
workshops, lectures followed by suggested readings, and will gradually
focus on individual projects. Students will be encouraged to investigate the
limits of algorithmic design both theoretically and in practice through a scripting
environment.