Jaclyn Saik Looking Outwards 3

Computational digital fabrication is a really practical application of code. Having a little bit of experience with laser cutting and 3d printing and talking to a lot of passionate people about CNC mills, I see how many technical applications there are for physical objects generated out of code. In Professor Levin’s article about Parametric 3D form, I was especially interested in the design system for the parametric human body. It reminded me a lot of a video game I used to play when I was younger, Sims 3, where you could go in and highly customize a character’s physical appearance, but a lot of the traits would be related and relative to each other. I also found his article neat because it used phrases like “artist-researchers”: Aa a designer interested in STEM applications, it’s cool to see a word that synthesizes these things.

I was drawn to Oxman’s Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab because they talked a lot about using computation to mimic or explore nature-driven designs, which is something I discovered while researching for last week’s Looking Outwards and something I think is a fascinating way to pull computer science full circle into the natural world. One project that this group made is called “Rottlace” (September 2016), where they designed a mask system for the popular Icelandic singer Björk. This mask is designed to look like “a face without skin”, and I think they achieved their goal, as you can see in the image.

I really admire this work because it is so technical in creation, but so natural in final form. It takes a great deal of artistic decision-making to make sure it is accurate, but not gory. The reason this example of computational digital fabrication is so interesting is because this team is tasked with generating very organic objects, like muscles and ligaments in the face, from code. They account for what they call “property transitions”, which means when there is harder bone versus cartilage versus soft tissue versus muscle, by changing the way their algorithms are set up. Bones are more geometric-based, while ligaments are obtained as “cloud point data” based on plotted points from the shape of Björk’s face. All in all, this sounds like a beautiful and complicated project. Like IDeAte on steroids!