Calcifications

A research project by CITA in collaboration with Alan Penn and Chiron Mottram at the Bartlett program of Virtual Environments.

Calcifications explores the relationship between an intelligent design environment, its interfacing and fabrication. As a probe Calcifications explore the site of a table interfacing the events that take place on the table with the definition and fabrication of the table surface.

Calcifications is an agent based environment in which vision based agents move across a two dimensional surface. Interfaced by a camera interface mounted beneath the table the agents are attracted by points of darkness creating a clustering around events that take place on the table. As people touch the surface or place objects on the table they inform the digital environment of the agents create a generative landscape that is in a continual state of formation and dissolve.

This temporal based environment was used to define a topological surface informing the design of the table. The generated movement traces of the agents was used to develop a deep drawing defining the cutting pattern for the CNC milled table surface. The surface is cut in translucent Perspex thereby varying the visibility of the events above. In this way the design of the surface influences the events taking place on the surface as well as the agents actions upon these. In this positive feedback loop the environment  for the digital becomes charged affecting the emergent interactions of the agents and changing the performance of the digital.

Calcifications was exhibited as part of the ArchiTronic exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre, Nov 2007. ArchiTronic was a joint event with the international conference  Erlebnis And Erfahrung: Aesthetics Of Pervasiveness at Copenhagen University and was presented as part of the conference as a case study.