Supermatter

Super­mat­ter

year: 2009

loca­tion: new york city

client: bridge art gallery

mate­r­ial: cast bronze

col­lab­o­ra­tors: dave pigram of supermanoeuvre

project lead: wes mcgee

project team: paulis austrins

SUPERMATTER, is both a con­tin­u­a­tionof broader research  into sys­temic processes of for­ma­tion, and an assess­ment of the capac­ity of con­tem­po­rary pro­to­typ­ing tech­nolo­gies to elab­o­rate thou­sand year old processes of fabrication.

The project, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between super­ma­noeu­vre and mat­ter design, is pre­sented as a fam­ily of objects cast in bronze and explores the algo­rithm as a geno­typ­i­cal mor­phol­ogy, where sim­i­lar­ity across the col­lec­tive is instilled through the instruc­tions of assem­bly embed­ded within the algo­rithm as it oper­ates on a dis­crete set of geo­met­ric aggre­gates.  The input of geom­e­try enables spe­ci­a­tion of each resul­tant object as the rules of growth and assem­bly are applied to the spe­cific geo­met­ric con­straints and poten­tials of con­nec­tion par­tic­u­lar to each aggre­gate prim­i­tive.  Through chang­ing either one or all of the prim­i­tives, or the gen­er­a­tive rules of the Lin­den­mayer (L-System) algo­rithm itself, dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion across the pop­u­la­tion can be instan­ti­ated.  To this end, the project facil­i­tates a shift from the dia­gram as an abstract machine with lit­tle or no phys­i­cal capac­ity, to a new def­i­n­i­tion of the archi­tec­tural model as a com­pre­hen­sive method­ol­ogy of spa­tial, for­mal and mate­r­ial distribution.