What are some adjectives around how the project will make its audience feel?
I want the audience to feel awe: awe at the sheer scale of the sculpture and awe at the notion that we are entering a new era when living systems are as much a part of our environments as they are with humanity itself. The audience should feel connected and unified to all of space and time—a connection to the unknown. The project should elicit feelings of fluidity and movement. The audience should conjure adjectives like geometrical, mathematical, biological (inspired by nature), fractal, patterned, and cellular-automata-like.
What problem are you trying to solve (if design-oriented)? What are you trying express or convey (if art-focused)?
This project is both an art project and a design project. The ultimate problem being addressed is how we can incorporate living systems into our design practice. In the age of the anthropocene, I will argue, it is imperative to be working symbiotically with the “natural” world around the “artificial” one. This project may be a research endeavor to explore one particular living system or a series of smaller experiments using multiple living organisms. The project will seek to show (1) how we can leverage technology and mathematics to model organic systems to better understand how they function, (2) how we can “merge digital and biological fabrication to deliver a holistic and sustainable design approach”[1] and (3) how we can use specific living organisms (silk worms, algae, bacteria, fungi) to grow rather than build our environment.
This project will also have an art focus. Aesthetically the project will lean heavily on the work of Buckminster Fuller, Francois Roche, Alisa Andrasek, and Nervous System. The form of the sculpture will be rooted in geometrical symmetries and playful extrapolations from natural phenomenon. Conceptually, the project will also seek to express the notion that we are living in a fractal multi-verse—all a part of an endless and repetitive pattern. Once we grok[2] this concept, we understand that we are, at the same time, both a part of the whole and of the nothingness. We will understand that to incorporate living systems into our environments is to incorporate ourselves with all that ever was, is, and will be.
[1] Oxman, et.al. Silk Pavilion: A Case Study in Fibre-Based Digital Fabrication
[2] Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. Concept taken from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.