Digital Formless: SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis-Caleb Roberts

Digital Formless

Caleb Roberts SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2020

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Contents Thesis Statement

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Thoughts on Formlessness

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L’Informe - Georges Bataille

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Manifesto, Maybe - Michael Meredith

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Thoughts on the Digital

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To Be Transformative - Brian Cantley

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Interrupted Projections - Neil Denari

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Viewports vs Images - Caleb Roberts

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Proxy Techniques

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Proxy Formlessness

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Tectonic Aggregations - Engeland Apostal

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Relations Within a Formless Proxy System

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Experiments in Proxy Formlessness

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Anthropocenic Landscapes - Caleb Roberts

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Experiments

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Digital Formless

Current digital modelling techniques rely on a specific set of tools built into the interface of the software that produce formal language directly tied to the output of these tools. This workflow confines designers to a territory limited by the effects of the tools they are using. It results in a design process that anticipates the end result before beginning, and deploys digital modelling tools in a particular way to achieve that result, leaving behind a trace of each tool. Proxy rendering tools, however, offer a means of questioning these digital operations directly resulting in a formal language limited by the digital modelling tools.

This thesis deploys proxy rendering techniques to systematically peel away certain limitations of digital modelling processes. By introducing a more complex system that discards the certainty of standard digital techniques in favor of a system that deploys uncertainty and complexity, proxy rendering

techniques result in formlessness rather than a specific formal language. Proxy rendering aggregates any number of geometries onto a point cloud in a random manner, generating a complex and unexpected result each time. This uncertainty is maintained until the time of rendering, displaying only a proxy symbol of the aggregated geometry in the viewport. The designer is challenged to produce blindly, only seeing what he has made in the final image.

In order to understand the implications of such a system, a series of design exercises will be conducted at the scale of a pavilion, a museum, and an airport.

These exercises will explore the validity of a design methodology that privileges uncertainty and complexity over certainty and clarity. Ultimately, these exercises will attempt to question whether limits of standard digital design tools can be broken; and, if so, what new limits/possibilities might arise from such a system.

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Thoughts on Formlessness

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L’Informe (Formless) Georges Bataille

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

Bataille, Georges, Allan Stoekl, Donald M. Jr Leslie, and Carl R Lovitt. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-193 Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Formless, adj. having no regular form or shape lacking order or arrangement having no physical existence Synonyms: amorphous, shapeless, unformed, unshaped, unstructured

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Manifesto, Maybe Michael Meredith

1. Formlessness now is not formlessness then.

2. Today, formlessness is an inherently historical act.

3. Achieving a total formlessness is impossible.

4. Historically, formlessness was achieved through negation or reduction.

5. You have to get outside of these boundaries to make the formless today.

Manifesto, Maybe - Michael Meredith, MOS

1 Our first point is that formlessness now is not formlessness then. The problem is simply that some postwar art prac-tices set a misleading precedent for both art and architecture, because they made us think that the formless could be an escape from history.

Think: Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, people like Robert Smithson, Lygia Clark, Francois Morellet, John Cage, etc. Each tried to escape the effects of history: Smithson through a material and tectonic primitivism (trying to work before history); Clark through temporal instability (constructing an object’s existence as a kind of performance to dislocate it from a singular moment in time); Morellet through systemic/ positivist logic (operating outside of time through tautology); Cage through chance (using inclusive and random

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processes to frustrate linear narratives). The idea seems to have been that by producing formless-ness you could make something that was unlike anything that had come before—you could sever your work’s relationship to the past, escaping the historical narratives of art and archi-tecture, especially those produced by Modernism, with its relentlessly formal compositional strategies. Arguably, the avant-garde has always been linked with a search for the formless. But today formlessness is an inherently historical act, precisely because so many of these practices have come before us. Escape from history (or from form) seems impossible; at best, we can hope for a momentary reprieve.

2. Which brings us to our second point: achieving a total or universal formless-ness is impossible. Instead, there’s a sliding scale, a value

system, where some things are more formless and some are more formal. This means that formlessness is a debatable condition.

Once debatable, it becomes politicized, but formlessness is already inevitably political because funda-mentally it’s an effort to restructure existing aesthetic value systems by dislocating the relationship between objects and the images and narratives that typically support them. It’s attempting to produce a sort of gap or temporal break, like that great Karl Krauss quote: “The closer one looks at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.” Formlessness attempts to increase this distance, or make it more present. For architecture this distance is especially important, given that architectural objects are always entangled in a mess of institutional and political hierarchies.

Fighting for this distance— giving the object a temporary space and some degree of independence — is a radical and important approach.

The escape from history is inherently an escape from the policed

narratives of museums and academia. It is an attempt to produce new politics, to engender alternate identities (potentially generational identities) or some such constituencies for both architecture and art.

3. The third point is that the practices of the sixties and seventies mostly achieved formlessness through strategies of negation or reduction. Think: Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenberg, Barnett Newman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, Peter Eisenman, even Aldo Rossi. Because of the ascendency of modernist paint-ing at that time, form was understood primarily as a matter of two-dimensional pictorial composition. In that context any kind of non-compositional strategy made sense, but it would ultimately always be a reaction against painting’s discourse, even if implemented in sculpture or architecture. (Judd’s “Specific Objects,” for example, was a very explicit attack on what he called

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“Pt “the limits of painting,” and even Eisenman’s work refers to a painting discourse that follows in the Mifflin tradition of part / whole compositional relationships.) But today we’re dealing with so much more. Painting isn’t the dominant discourse pushing form today: everything, from media studies to parametrics in architecture to the spectacular turn in large-scale installation art, comes with its own assumptions about and prescriptions for form and the referential (and even symbolic) dimensions of the formless itself. Producing formlessness through a singular strategy of negation feels impossible.

Techniques of blankness, matter, chance, piles, droops, cuts, crumples, scatters, stains, fields, grids, systems, dust, clouds, fuzz, readymades, etc., have all become thoroughly institutionalized images. In the age of Google, when hundreds of references are a click away, the repetition of these strategies becomes another echo, reiterating the academic institutions of art and architecture. The grid is an example of this shift.

At one point it seemed like the ultimate non-compositional strategy,

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as if its deadpan neutrality and infinite extensibility could avoid, once and for all, the problem of producing form through subjective decision-making. This grid no longer exists. Today’s grid is no longer an escape from form, but a thoroughly institutionalized and historical reference. Our only remaining possibility for producing formlessness seems to be through an additive, inclusionary methodology, rather than a reductive one. We might need to construct weird disciplinary concoctions: maybe something like mixing the video feedback effects of datamoshing with Chris Burden’s Beam Drop and adding Aldo Rossi’s typological constructions... For us the problem isn’t as simple as composition vs. non-composition; you have to get outside of this binary to make the form-less today. We use non-compositional strategies (piles, grids), but we also use formless effects (fuzz, glitter, pattern, spectral color, or monochrome) that further undermine part-to-whole relationships. We mix them up into new entropic

concoctions, producing an instability. The friction between all these techniques creates a frequency akin to noise, or something oscillating between signal and noise. This oscillation resists a single, institutionalized reading, just as it undermines more than one version of form. It gets back to that fundamental dislocation of object from narrative and image that the formless is supposed to be about. So fuzz + grids + droops + spectral color might be a start. Who knows?

Meredith, Michael. “Manifesto, Maybe.� Manifesto Series: Formless 01 (2013): 158–68.

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Thoughts on the Digital

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To Be Transformative Brian Cantley

To Be Transformative - Bryan Cantley

The donor painting: The $25 painting (by W.Chapman) is rather mundane - a boy and girl, dressed in clothes from a bygone era sit under brimmed hats with a lunch pail, fishing and looking off into the vista of a lake. The ribbons on her dress. his suspenders and long-sleeved shirt suggest a time before the ubiquity of technology and mass communication. The irony was not lost on us as we searched for the perfect donor image- since the inserted object, the Mobile Gatherspace©, is an architectural condition of the future [ even to us in 20 14], a scenario that suggests ‘place download’ and global space connectivity. We began by scouring swap meets and antique shops, looking for the ideal combination of color, size, subject matter, cost and painting style, since the impetus

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was to try to recreate the architectural phenomenon in a style that matched the original painting. We rejected dozens for their lack of content or painting styles that would not suggest a reality, virtual or otherwise. There were indeed other paintings that were executed with a much higher level of skill, but since this was to be an experiment, it was difficult to justify the $300 price tag this would have carried. Also added to the selection criteria was the attempt to ‘make precious’ that, which has been discarded, or is in its ‘second use’, to couple with the idea of multiple time[s].

The process was fairly straightforward, though quite challenging as there was an interesting and thick oscillation between analog and digital. Once we photographed the painting, I then had to find a camera view in the digital model that would blend with the donor perspective. After finding integration, the next task was to duplicate

@bcantly

@pkulper

the sun angles to simulate the shadows found in the image. The model was rendered, then cut and pasted into the Photoshop version of the full painting, to confirm position and lighting. The real challenge was then to paint on top of the model image using a trial and error method of filters and effects to attempt to make the object read as if it was painted possibly at the same time as the original, so that the paradox of image vs. time would be somewhat believable. After arriving at a conclusion that satisfied both the architect and the painter, we simply printed out the digital image and used that as a guide to superimpose this media-shifted object into the image, using a mastery of traditional oil-painting techniques.

Is ‘The Myth of Imagery’ the artificial representation of a natural system, or the natural depiction of a synthetic condition? The image captures a lake and surrounding topographies: a natural condition.

The painting, quite literally, is mock or a simulacrum. The superficial and literal reading is that the act of painting, regardless of time between strokes, is a natural condition of the verb ‘to paint’. In other words, there is only one medium involved. Paint is the natural hinge. It is both the action and the outcome. Painting…

The depiction, the content, the image is highly synthetic for several reasons. First, the inserted object [the Mobile Gatherspace] is artificial to its context--it’s man-made, in high contrast to the original subject matter. Second, the object itself is that of a highly advanced technology, a collection of completely artificial systems. Since the painting is natural based on the first observation, we may then conclude for the purposes of this discussion that the art object is indeed representing several layers of the unreal.

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So what then is the mythology of this endeavor, as the image title suggests? Is the architecture a reality, a shift in context if not in literal time? Is the architecture a mere projection onto the surface of the painting, thus maintaining the purity of the original content?... is it a condition of Folded Chronologies? Again, then, are we viewing the image; are we looking at one through the filter of another, or are we looking at them as a singular event? Multiplicities filtered through the membrane of singularity.

The advantage of this type of multidisciplinary experiment is the multiple readings that each allows. In the art world, it is rare to define an image/object as a study or representation of something other than itself--a painting is the definite object, not a study for a larger painting per se. It is the thing. However, in architecture, the image/object is almost always a symbol for another state of the entity--a reduced scale and controlled material representation-- a thing not about itself

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as much as it is another manifestation. It is another thing. A drawing of an object is usually not the finale--it is typically a study or signifier for a pre-reality version… the object is to be built (ironically enough usually not of the architect’s own hand, itself an interesting condition of authorship and identity). So then this particular artifact bridges, if not destroys the typical role of the represented condition. There is no correct way to interpret. The only wrong way would be to not interpret.

My work typically attempts to obfuscate the traditional roles of the designated symbol in architecture denotation. Drawings are not objects they are deconstructions of time, layers of states of being, mis-representational hybrids of construction technology and the graphical notation that usually serves as directions for said assembly. I use the phrase “not drawings of objects, but drawings of drawings” attempting to expand the boundaries of what it means to

draw [observation], and what it means to draw architectural thought [exploration].

Cantley, Brian. “To Be Transformative.” Edge Condition 3 (September 2014): 62–69. http://www. edgecondition.net/uploads/9/5/5/6/9556752/edge_vol03_b.pdf.

The NSFW (Not Safe for Work) series have tried to construct a similar argument within the field, initially the nomenclature was chosen because the drawings were using accepted architectural graphic notations, but in a way that prevented not only the singularity of constructed tolerance, but the individuality of reading and intention as well. Since technical drawings (construction documents, or CD’s in the US) have been used to ‘get stuff built’, or achieve ‘work’ as a business as well as artistic reality, these drawings began to take similar notational systems and refute their original meanings/applications, thus not being safe as CD’s for build ability, as well as prosperous business models. They were not safe for work…

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Osculations

WHITE NOISE:

does structured repetition result in the erasure of all difference? is this erasure aesthetically unpleasant, or pleasantly familiar? how do we react to and interact with such homogeneity?

OSCULATIONS:

proximity and closeness. objects on a trajectory towards each other but they meet only momentarily. movement, orientaiton, and motive are all encoded.

Scanned with CamScanner

Scanned with CamScanner 21

Difference and Repetition

OVERCODES:

structured repetition becomes an oversaturated homogeneity. layers of information blend, overlap, and collide with each other producing new readings

DIFFERENCE & REPETITION:

within a system of repetition, how can difference be introduced? How can monotony be avoided and novelty introduced?

Scanned with CamScanner

Denari, Neil. “Interrupted Projections�: Another Global Surface or Territorial Re-Codings on the World Sheet. Tokyo: Toto Shuppan, 1996.

Scanned with CamScanner

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Viewports vs Images Caleb Roberts

VIEWPORTS VS IMAGES: we desgin in software that has a particular way of imaging but no connection to the final output. this “computer-vision� is forgotten and set aside in favor of hyperreal renderings.

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Digital modelling techniques rely heavily on a linear workflow that begins with the model view and ends with the rendered image. The workflow begins with an empty cartesian grid within which is inscribed a series of points, lines, surfaces, and masses--all in an abstract, nondescript grey color. once a satisfying form is produced, textures and lighting are added in to infer material, space, scale, etc. into the system. these two spaces--model space and render space-- are kept separate and very limited interaction between the two is allowed. But what if they were allowed to intersect? what if the model view became rendered and the qualities afforded by the rendered view were visible from the beginning of the process. Beginning in a contextualized environment with implicit material and scale might result in forms that respond more directly to that context. in a system where these factors could be accounted for from the start, would the forms produced be different than those currently produced?

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Viewports vs Images - Caleb Roberts

In the world of architectural design, architects are challenged with seeing their work in many different media, platforms, and contexts.

The process of digital design includes, among other things, multiple representations and imaging methods. From the viewports of modeling software, to 2D drawings of buildings, to rendered images of projects in rendering software and in post-processing software, architects face their designs in extremely different representations throughout the design process. Currently, however, these different representations are almost always kept separate from each other, and designers allow for little to no engagement between the various modes of seeing their projects.

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Designers begin in 3d modelling softwares such as Rhinoceros 3D, Maya, and Cinema 4D, where they face a limitless empty world, 1 except for the grid delimiting the orientation of this world. The process of design involves intervening in this emptiness, introducing and editing geometry. The representation of these geometries is always abstracted to either lines, some grey colored surface, or a combination of the two. Objects are always presented to the designer in a projected view: either orthographic, axonometric, or perspective.2 The combination of these two abstract ways of seeing mean that the designer sees his design as pure form during the process of modeling.

Rendering, in contrast, is the designer’s first opportunity to remove from his work the layers of abstraction imposed on it by modeling viewports. While viewports privilege form and technical readings of objects for the sake of efficiency, Rendering privileges the real--or realistic. Images produced from rendering rely on the same projective

views as the viewport; however, the process of rendering allows the designer to imbue his creation with physical characteristics of material, texture, transparency, light, etc. The infinite grid is replaced with a ground and an environment that limit the space the model inhabits. Scale is implied by the material qualities given to the object and context is crafted. This way of seeing allows the designer to view his design as he imagines it would be in the world. The disposition of the model is that of the real world and not of the software.

Collapsed Projections

While the viewport and the image are generally maintained as separate, lacking any interaction or correlation, the possibility of an overlap or collapse of the two offers an interesting possibility for a new way of seeing that neither affords on their own. Architecture illustrators, Perry Kulper and Brian Cantley deploy this collapse of representational regimes in their work to generate new readings. For

Cantley, standard architectural notation symbols overlap projected drawings creating “mis-representational hybrids” reflective of his 3 thoughts and explorations within architecture. While his work typically exists within the medium of hand drawing, Cantley collapses elements of digital architectural notation onto the page in such a way that he confuses the boundary between mediums. Similarly, Kulper deploys elements from digital modeling scene structures in rendered images to foreground the designer’s technical viewpoint. In a single image of Kulper’s, one can find the expected: objects rendered with material, lighting, and scale. However, at the same time, one can find the unexpected as well: lighting rigs, additional cameras, object meshes and other elements from the viewport blend into his images. Kulper erases the boundary between viewport and image to reveal the designer’s privileged view from behind the scenes.

Both of these examples produce a tension between technical qualities

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of viewports and affective qualities of images. Ultimately, the clarity of separation between the two is lost and one cannot discern each side from the other. In this grey area of making, relationships are forged between the viewport and the image and the interaction between the two is foregrounded.

Image as Process Certain tools allow for interaction between these two worlds. Proxy rendering tools rely on the abstraction of the viewport to represent specific geometries that are aggregated in the scene. Instead of the grey surface and wireframe, proxy tools present geometry as simple points or lines within the viewport. The technical reading of the geometry is thus reduced to positional information only. In this scenario, the designer relies on the rendered image to understand what he has made. The form of the object does not manifest until the time of rendering.

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The design process within the framework of proxy rendering techniques then becomes a feedback loop where the designer blindly alters input values and generates an image to understand the results then repeats the process. Here, the design process is visualized as a series of images as iterations, all maintaining a trace of each other. One could then ask, is the final design the final image, or the collection of images? And can/when does the process end?

1. Damjan Jovanovic, Fictions: A Speculative Account of Design Medium, in Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture (UCL Press, 2016).

2. Ibid. p. 30 3. Brian Cantley, To Be Transformative in Edge Condition, issue 3, (Online, 2014)

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Proxy Techniques

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Proxy Formlessness

proxy rendering is a technique in which large amounts of geometry can be rendered at low computing cost by replacing instances of geometry with a representational marker until the time of rendering. currently, this technique is used for objects that appear in a field condition such as grass and trees. the aim of this thesis will be to utilize this technique in conjunction with tectonic geometries to rapidly generate and visualize unique tectonic assemblies. the project not only focuses on the generated form/building, but also on the techniques of representation and drawing used to graphically convey an architectural idea. the representational structure of proxy rendering relies on the relationship between position, scale, and orientation of the representational marker—the proxy—and the same factors of the actual geometry. any adjustments of these factors in the proxy will result in the same transformation of the geometry. the benefit of this technique is that an entire complex tectonic assembly can be developed through a much simpler and quicker visual apparatus. whole assemblies can be generated from a simple aggregation of lines (or any other proxy symbol).

one example of this technique might be the utilization of voxels in design. aggregated systems of voxels rely on a singular threedimensional unit (usually a cube) as a proxy for the aggregated element within the system. within such systems, voxels are stacked upon one another with no space between with all information about each voxel completely dependent on its neighboring voxels. these aggregates ultimately generate a volume or mass of whatever discrete part is within the voxel. the utilization of existing proxy rendering techniques frees the proxy from necessarily being attached and directly related to its neighbors. proxy instances can be addressed individually or the entire aggregated system can be developed as a whole allowing for more control over relationships within the system.

proxy, n.

An entity that stands in for another.

An object that represents another.

Synonyms: Intermediary, stand-in, surrogate, alternative, representative, substitute

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Standard Workflow

Base Geometries

Join

Intersection

Adapt

Divide

Merge

Distort

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Proxy Workflow Point Cloud

Aggregations

Distortions

Possible Geometries

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tectonic aggregations

tectonic

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structure

mass

aggregate

tectonic

structure

mass

aggregate

tectonic

structure

mass

aggregate

The work of @sheepairsupport ( Engeland Apostal) creates an aesthetic language out of aggregation. In his workflow, Engeland generates highly complex systems of elements through the implementation of proxy rendering techniques.

tectonic

structure

His work can be categorized into 4 types: object, space, building mass, and tectonic accumulation. The object manifests as an aggregate fully framed within the boundaries of the image and therefore a lack of scale--it is difficult to infer the scale of an individual element or of the whole. the space is an aggregation of elements that form an enclosure or boundary, implying space; these elements typically appear quite large in scale. Similarly, the building @sheepairsupport mass is an accumulation of large, massive elements which imply building form with elements resembling fenestration and other architectural elements. The tectonic accumulation is mass aggregate tectonic structure mass aggrega somewhwere between the others: it accumulates tectonic forms into a mass that is sometimes more object-like and sometimes more building-like.

The intrigue of this work is in the wide range of results generated from one technique. As is the goal of this thesis, Engeland’s work does not privelege any specific outcome over another. At the same time, while every result is particular and unique, viewing the entire body of work at once produces a homogeneity that I find quite interesting.

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@sheepairsupport

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Relations Within a Formless Proxy System 01 02 03 04

Point Cloud Primitives Aggregates Distortions

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Experiments in Proxy Formlessness

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