For those planning to come by the studio today to see the results of the workshop, we regret to inform that the works have been taken down du to the neighbors complaints. We will be in the studio 3-5 pm today for those who would like know more about the project.
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So, the workshop has come to a close. Finally we ended up building two projects, one by Yangyang Seughee and the other by Song Yating. While postponing the conclusions until I have recovered my current sleeping hour deficit, I will just post a few photos from the contstruction and review today. Critics for the review were Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, Travis Russett, Michael Caster, Anna Laura Govoni, Serge Onnen and Niko de la Faye.
Alright! Finally we are getting some these two very abstract parallel processes to converge. After three days of coding, categorizing, and collecting we could see the our found objects getting lined up in the virtual world. This is of course very exciting and even though I am not sure how we got to this point in terms of coding, I do thing I will have a better idea of how the code is working when we are further down the line. Thanks to Jordan, we are now able to sort all our garbage by all kinds of variables (as they are now called). Below are some of the results.
First, aligned in order they were originally found:
Then, sorted by weight:
And finally, by longest length variable (clearly):
Although the full potentials of what the outcome of this marriage of high-tech/lo-tech can be remain a bit blurry, I am still quite confident that we are not doing it all in vain. At least we will have relieved a few hutongs in Beijing of some unwanted (which implies a pretty low level of desireability) material, and given them a new status as an essential part of a speculative architectural experiment.
Below: Marking and tagging of today’s collection of scrap wood (mostly)
After a slow start we finally got a bit deeper into the coding language of Processing. Not that I could understand more than 10 per cent of what I was doing, but once all the brackets and semicolons were in place we actully had a piece of code = a functioning animation on the screen.
Below some screen shots of the array of falling balls we ended up with:
The afternoon proceeded with another round of mining, but this time with a very meager solid output. The students found more potential sites for collection but ended up just documenting and not bringing anything back. This was partly due to the bulikiness of the found materials and a slight misinterepretation of the mining exercise in general. The first day we discussed the possibilities of engaging with locals to take or buy materials from their personal storage collections in the courtyards, but after some inquiries it turns out (unsurprisingly) that it’s very difficult to track down the owner of a specific pile, and that if you do, they rarely want to give up something to someone like us.
The conclusion was that we need to act like the other garbage collectors who go around the hutongs, only taking things that are obviously left out to be picked up. This is of course rather difficult since you need to learn the rules of the street in order not to disturb this delicate social system.
Meanwhile, we also started the process of categorization and notation. Each object will be defined by a ling string of values including time and location where it was found, person who found it, size, material, colour, weight etc etc. These values will then become variables in the internal organisation/design process in Processing.
More on that to come…
