Take that Venice Beach

This is by far one of my FAVORITE green-ings of daily life. This video was made by GOOD magazine. This wonderful man made the first official ecogym. It's reminiscent of what the first Olympians might have been stretching and flexing on. The brilliance behind this idea is that we might not need to "re-invent" the wheel, but just figure out how it was done in the first place. A dash of comedy and salt is always enjoyed.

Level One part 4

Recently I have been working projects that contribute to my idea of the inhabitable organism. I origianlly broke it down in to certain steps.
Level One consisted of
1. Noise Recycled into the System
2. Nesting/BioMimicry/BioMimetics
3. Existing/Exploration of Materials
4. Pattern Recognition and Accumulation

This latest endevor has been focusing on Level One part 4. (It also works with Level One part 1 to a degree. )

I have been having "happenings" during lunch time in Los Angeles. The project "Mass Collection 1" is about well that. Mass collection! The medium is chewed gum and plexi glass. I stand in a specific spot for 3 hours and ask people to come and chew a piece of gum and place it where ever they feel it belongs on the plexi. If some one is passing by with gum already in their mouth, I ask them to place that piece on the plexi and I give them a new piece. The gum is a Mexican brand of Chicklets and come in a variety of flavor and colors. This piece also is about mark making and territory. So far, I have had 2 of these happenings.

The first site was Downtown Los Angeles by the Public Library. There, the demographics of the crowd was mainly people in suits, bike messengers, and some homeless. There were even some tourists in the mix. Here are some of the photos of the piece and the making of it.

This is the final composition for that session::
The other site in front of a coffee shop in the Arts District in Los Angeles. The accumulation was completely different. People were more apt to changing and adding to previously placed pieces. This piece was more graffiti like. People also felt compelled to draw and be creative with it, saying "I don't know what to draw/I don't know what to make." The only direction I gave (for both pieces) was to place the gum where ever you saw fit, preferably on the plastic. This piece was also more 3dimentional, where people would add to each others mounds. People were also bringing up a precedent gum wall in Northern CA.

Here are some images from the wall in San Luis Obispo::

The next stop is Chinatown. Other sites are heavy pedestrian places... I might be in Venice Beach tomorrow doing it so come

don't burn on re-entry

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.
-Bruce Sterling

It's about time I returned out of retirement and continued in my pursuit. (I hit some unfortunate events and one unfortunate vehicle hit me...)

But alas, returned.

I am in Minneapolis right now for the week. I am attending the ACADIA conference on silicon and skin. They focus on bio materials in digital design in architecture. Some of the speakers are a few of my favorites:: Sanford Kwinter and Francios Roche. Others I am interested in are :: Jerome Frumar, Charles Lee, Jelle Feringa, Aaron Westre, and of course who would be talking at this conference? RAMESH! my first computer modeling teacher from Carnegie Mellon University. Oh the days of FormZ. More to come as I attend.

I am reposting my final (sofar) video later today. It up loaded incorrectly before. Sorry about that.

SNEAKY PEAKY....

Here is one of the renderings. This one isnt used in the film. But you get the idea of what is happening. This is all you get for now. The film is to be presented in... 48 or so hours.. so it will be online after wards.. stay tuned. and WATCH OUT.
Thank you to Jenna also for helping me make this... AWESOME.

Almost a party favor...

I didn't want to make any fun-guy jokes. This little bugger is a fungus from New Zealand. Ileodictyon cibarium is the name of this amazing growth! It forms this structure formally is reminiscent of coral and a vonoroi script.

I stumbled across this while looking for images for the film I am making.
Think of this being in the "structure catagory/ the scaffolding.


"Fruiting Body: Initially a whitish "egg" up to 7 cm across, attached to white cords; rupturing, with the mature fruiting body emerging as a more or less round, cage-like structure, 5-25 cm across, forming 10-30 polygons; arms about 1 cm in diameter, not thickened at the intersections, white underneath the olive brown spore slime; the egg tissue creating a whitish volva, but the mature structure detaching from it." _Kuo, M. (2008, July). Ileodictyon cibarium. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/ileodictyon_cibarium.html

grow lichen this?

you want to be a super (foods) model?

Here is the most recent processing script so far. We have 3d space. We have movie out put! We have a movable environment. This code is built off of what Valentina Vasi and I presented for Roland Snook's Swarm class last semester. Granted most of the origional code work has to be contributed to Mr. Snooks. He's amazing. This script uses the kVec and kGeom libraries that he and his other partners at Kukkugia developed. I also have to address Mr. Baoquoc Doan (aka mr. WOK) for helping me so far also, especially with the video out put.

I will be posting some of the interview footage soon.

Green walls && growth walls

This is an installation made by Jesse Harlin and the Shadow Observatory. Growth Interactive installation consisted of music generated by user input on two gravis gamepad video game controllers. A large image of CG leaves were projected on the wall that responded to the music created by the user.
I wrote him an email and he got back to me (in only a few hours!) Jesse is currently working on a 14 ft. tall organism that will detect human proximity and motion, temperature and light levels to ascertain an "emotional state" and then communicate that emotional state through 16 speakers over 8 discrete channels. Pretty groovy. He is using arduino and max/msp. He is making a "symbiotic music organism." Very similar to Marcos Novak's Navigable Music but the music its not just the void in the space, it is the thing. (I need to get my installation rolling along.. but thats another story. ) Here is the video footage link he sent me:

Imaging if this also could happen with actually green walls?

le interviews...

Interviews start in a few hours.. the line up is.. well lining up...
First I am presenting them with my thesis....

Here is my thesis statement for what we can go off of....

Current culture is now polluted and propagated with escape routes and throw rugs of green and sustainable design, offering penny pinching game plans to move towards the illusion of tree hugging in Prada. Buildings (dwellings) can not be fully sustainable until they can assimilate and integrate themselves into the contextual biospheres, self utilizing the excess materials through a symbiotic metabolism. Though as every object/particle could be argued as having its own agency and possible realities, their reaction via their observed system has the potential for being dynamic through time and scale. The goal of the matter is to chisel towards and ideally define what is an Inhabitable Organism, and thus developing the model for which it is entitled and can be communicated across the rhizome.

and here are some of the questions:


What does it mean (to you/your practice) to be sustainable?

What do you think the repercussions might be for buildings having metabolisms?

What do you think about the potential for buildings to be Inhabitable Organisms that work in symbiosis with its inhabitants?

What is the potential for self organizing space that has an active reaction to its users?

Interviews will be no more than 10 mins as this final film will be oh .. 10 mins.. I want to see what everyone has to say.. the model is coming along...

Here is a still from one the scripts I am messing with. I am making a composite with another one and getting it to be 3d...I should just use the swarming kokkugia code from last semester but....

How does your home grow...

Just to reiterate how awesome and on point this project is....
Thanks Terreform.
Thanks Mitchell.
and Thanks

Artist Edina Tokodi. Green terrorism! Reminiscent of the Knitta Please...