Tag: lookingOutwards-03

Designer Hasan Ragab creates immersive digital art using an AI text-to-image generator for Parametric Architecture. The model is called Midjourney and is hosted on a Discord server. After inputting responses to prompts, the AI bot will produce four variations of the result, then you can make more variations out of the existing variations. Hasan Ragab implements his Egyptian heritage into his work, creating futuristic Egyptian temples and reimagining Gaudi-esque buildings. Ideas are processed through a “parametric copy-paste” and new possibilities come with each variation. A perk of Midjourney is that it prioritizes more artistic than realistic results. Taking less than a minute, Midjourney is also very accessible and efficient, as easy as playing a game on your phone. A community of architects and designers has also formed surrounding the model to push the boundaries. Hasan Ragab views AI tools as a new path in architecture. AI tools will have to shift our views on creativity, whether it is for better or worse if up for debate.

Some works that have always stunned me are by the fashion designer Iris van Herpen. Her designs uniquely merge nature and technology by using 3D printed fabrics to reproduce patterns and parametric structures from the natural world. I have always thought her works were the representatives for fashion as an artform. Anecdotally, you’d think that 3D printed fabrics would be stiff and lackluster, but her pieces capture motion with incredible fluidity, thus proving her mastery of design and knowledge of nature. I imagine the algorithms contain something similar to the forLoops that we’ve discussed in this course — there are a lot of repetitive shapes with slight transformations to build a grand, cohesive piece. My personal favorite collection that she’s done is “Syntopia.” There’s something so ethereal, futuristic, but organic about it. Generally, I don’t keep up with the fashion scene, but her works have never failed to impress me.

link to Syntopia: https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/ludi-naturae

Neri Oxman has been a huge inspiration to me since I saw her featured on Netflix’s Abstract series. The concept of biomimicry (which is honestly more of a return to what was than a new concept) holds incredibly poignant as human innovation seems to split the sides of the uncanny valley and either try with incredible effort to mimic analog, natural, or otherwise older design ideas, or shoot beyond anything that has ever been imagined. Oxman’s most recent published project is entitled ‘Man-Nahata,’ the Native American word for the island of Manhattan. It imagines, if Manhattan were to undergo an collision wiping out its population, what the biological regrowth might look like, using ecological data from the island pre-colonization and also the current grid layout and zoning of the city. How might nature rebuild, and how might we rebuild around her? Generative algorithms imagine and plot how nature might overtake the current architecture, and how our city planning could influence a natural process.

In 2015, a startup called “Eyebeam” showed many of its computational fashion pieces at New York fashion week. Computational fashion aims to touch upon many themes such as aesthetic, ergonomics, and intellectual property. What I admire about computational fabrication within fashion, is that it is extremely innovative and predictive of the future. Because traditional garments are made of fabric, they are fluid in nature. Today fluidity has become a popular style in design and architecture. Architects such as Zaha Hadid have been inspired by the fluidity of fashion pieces and reflected fluidity in their architecture. 

However, the three main issues computation fashion desires to fix are flexibility, recharge-ability, and affordability. 3D printing has become increasingly popular for designers when modeling. But one of the biggest downsides of a 3D printed model is that it lacks malleability and flexibility. Designers at the company have found that by printing on different materials, they can manipulate it with interlocking springs to make naturally stiff material, loose like fabric or textile. Designer Bradley Rothenberg prints on nylon, polymers, and sometimes metals. He has used Python for the program Rhino in the past, but now uses C++ to allow himself to create more advanced structures. By increasing and decreasing his code and varying the geometric properties, he can control the material properties better.

Fashion technologies need to work throughout the day, and thus an important factor for computational fashion designers is recharge-ability. Eyebeam’s project director advised against having to plug a garment piece into your smartphone because it is inconvenient. Instead, professor Dan Steingard of Princeton University has been exploring energy options such as body heat, wind up solar, and bendable batteries. The third important factor is affordability. The minimum printing resolution for 3D printing is 500 microns. Because the resolution is not nice enough yet, there will have to be significant investments made in fashion technology.  

Source:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/53wdx3/haute-and-heavy-exploring-the-possibilities-of-computational-fashion

A computational fabrication project I found interesting was the Computational Design and Fabrication Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Learning Human-Environment Interactions using Conformal Tactile Textiles. The project explores how the user has sensory interactions with a variety of various textiles. The textiles used are created via digital machine knitting of inexpensive piezoresistive fibers. They are then calibrated using machine learning techniques. The textiles are able to sense the various interactions that humans have with textiles, for example how they move, sit and adjust their clothing. The textiles then categorize the movement and store the data. I found this project particularly interesting because it is a small scale project that interacts quite intuitively with the user as opposed to the large scale intervention that we typically think of when we think of mapping human movement and interaction.