Digital Brutalism

Photograph: Mitchell Whitelaw

Last month a tangible generative system of building blocks - like Canberra lego - was showcased as a participatory event for the Neon Night Rider as part of the You Are Here Festival of experimental arts. For this evening community bicycle ride around the Lake there were a number of stations including a poet, a circus and the building blocks, and participants decorated themselves and their wheels in glow material becoming part of the show - and it was a spectacular sight, including when viewed from across the Lake.

Participants were able to play / interact / understand the system - ie see the work as algorithmic and emergent and themselves as agents/actors v the common situation of just seeing the work as sculptural end product or mysteriously generated on screen. It was also appropriate that the location was Rond Terraces at the bottom of Anzac Ave, which having views across the water to the Gallery gave a nice correspondence to the architecture it is seeded from.

Photographs: Mitchell Whitelaw

It has been helpful to focus development by having a specific context to design for. In this case the fabricated blocks had to:

Glow - I used 1000 green glow sticks (!) after trying a sample pot of $400 glow in the dark paint which looked great but glowed for only 30min despite a 10hr specification)

Be durable for outdoors, light weight and easy to transport and install, both for participants and as I wasn't there to facilitate - I used corflute with velcro dots, octahedral and tetrahedral blocks stick to each other but not themselves, and respectively are flat packed or stacked for transport. Blocks had 400mm edged equilateral triangular faces so are each approx 350mm tall.

Grow in the vertical direction for presence and have a degree of complexity - each block has open and closed faces, as does Madigan's ceilings which are horizontal and almost entirely only on a single level. So to allow growth upwards modules have to be turned around such that a closed face is on the top side - a module/cell can't grow in all directions, and growing vertically limits horizontal growth and creates gaps. In addition to giving complexity and interest, gaps can accrete into openings and enclosed habitable space.

A few minor hiccups to note - unfortunately when too many riders arrived at once there were not enough blocks to go around, and occasionally the flat packable octahedral blocks fell apart as the intra block connection being also made of velcro was of equal strength to the inter block connections.

A huge thanks to everyone who puts on this wonderful annual festival, and in particular for supporting this project, as well as to everyone who participated on the night. A lot of fun was had, and emergent sculptural form was made.

The building blocks were successful in making the generative system tangible and I am keen for a next iteration.

Following the idea of half filling cells, I have implemented a grid of half cells. Now every cell is natively a half. This flatter and simpler structure allows additional emergent form, as growth can now truly form straight vertical edges, and there is now less stepping as rather than extensively adding half protrusions form is only made by growth which is prioritised by neighbour count.

In the following series, as before, growth is determined by highest counts of neighbours with shared edges and restricted by varying max counts of all neighbours. Now there are 13 neighbours in total. There is no culling.

Set of max neighbourcount = 12, 20 cells: