 I've met most of you already, but I'm Josh Jordan. I'm the Digital Fabrication Manager here at G-Sub. I'm also the Director of the Shop in the fabrication operations. And so between those two titles, I've also been tasked with linking the academic realm that you guys are in the studio, which is sort of the mind of the school, the physical hand of the shop, which is why it's amazing that we have these three speakers today. And I've been asked by Dean Andrews to introduce them. They each have a stake in this process of making those connections that I'm supposed to be making. But their practices are very diverse and that they're titled and shaped differently. But all demonstrate is expansion in the scope of design practice. And I think they're also raising critical and productive questions about the meaning of making, as we're talking about here. They're also just inspiring designers whose work have all been celebrated for its big thinking impact and also the brevity of this message. So I'm really happy to get them here to kick off our lecture series and book and your studios for the day. We only have 90 minutes to do everything, which is why I'm trying to speak quickly. I encourage everybody to dive deeper into their work. So I'm going to introduce them in reverse order. Davide Crayola, and known as Crayola to the world, is a visual artist based in London. This is from his bout, because it's such a great sentence. He investigates dialogues in the unpredictable collisions, tensions, and equilibrium between the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures, immersive audio-visual installations, and performances. I think his work is particularly relevant because it's simultaneously deconstructive, looking at classical images and information, and it's very constructive at the same time. Building, fabricating things literally. So his work, I think, will also be shown as part of an exhibition at GSAP later in the semester. I don't know too much about it, but stay tuned. In the middle will be architect Billy Faircloth. She's a designer and educator in Philadelphia, where she's partner at Kieran Timberlake Architects. Joined there in 2008 as the director of their research group, which is a dedicated wing of their practice for research, which stands out as being one of the prime examples of that. This is from her bout. She leads a transdisciplinary group of professionals, levering research, design, problem solving processes from fields of diverse environmental management, chemical physics, material science, and architecture. She lectures at Penn Design and Harvard, GSD. She is a TED talker about the beauty of 2x4s. She's written books about the history and future of plastics. And one of the things I'd like to call out is her innovation as a design educator. I've had the experience of taking a class with Billy. She brings a really unique sort of immersion to the experience of being in design school, which I think was totally unique. And then finally, the first speaker we'll hear last up present is architect Mariana Dañas. She's also an educator and researcher as an architect she's principal of IK Studio, which you might know. They've officially been in practice since 2012. Before that, she was in Buenos Aires in London studying architecture, working in an advanced geometry unit at Arup, and then with Zaha Hadid in her office for a pretty long time. She's associate professor of architecture at GSD, where she teaches in the core sequence. So I think it's important to note how immersed she is in the world of student work. I know just from lurking around her world that she's an editor and curator of student work there. And her studios are also really at the leading edge of design thinking in studio. So I think it's great. So with that, I'll introduce Mariana first. Thank you, Josh, for the invitation. It's always exciting to be here. How do I turn this on? There we go. And very excited to also be in conversation with the other panelists. So I don't know if everybody had a chance to read the brief for today's event. It was very ambitious and interesting. It's deceiving at beginning because it talks about only the culture of making and fabrication, but then immediately goes into design implications and meanings. So really, it can be as narrow as we want or as broad as we want. So I decided to choose a series of projects. I'm not going to show all of these projects, but I do have a lot of slides. So I will speak rather fast and please to stop me if you need me to stop. This matrix shows a range of projects. But today, I'm only going to focus on installation work, work we do with performance artists and speculative projects. And one of the central agendas that connects all of this work is related to our interest in physical computation. And the projects are conceptualized and developed through relationships between analog conditions and digital conditions. So the way architecture turns out to be or their behaviors produce environments that are sometimes the same but are not necessarily a reproduction of one another. By that, I mean what happens in the digital environment and what happens in the physical environment. So throughout the presentation, I will show some models. I would also show some prototypes and other documents and artifacts. But I will start with the premise that a model is a scaled artifact that tends to represent something else. And a prototype is something that happens at one to one. Some effects are not scalable. So we always strive to attest at one to one. So the first project I'm going to show, it's called the Philadelphia Mask. And it's a multi-agent urban plan. And my partner teaches in Philadelphia. So we got to know the city pretty well. And there's an enormous amount of empty lots that are distributed throughout the city, regardless of their real estate value. And they're everywhere. So we were interested in researching how we can cognitively map our environment and how we perceive our location via references. So traveling through the city, we selected a few empty lots. And even their locale and their characteristics and their context, we, a grand narrative of a mask or the actual reimagining of the city was invented. Or architectural follies that we now call characters may interact among themselves and with city occupants. This is a demonstration of the characters in action as they destroy the city map. Together, these agents can generate a new set of city plans or morphologies that suggest different realities for Philadelphia. The test of reclaiming empty lots can therefore be one where reconfiguration of an entire city layout may happen due to temporal needs or the needs of the occupants. The project does not propose to actually produce these distortions on the city map, but it's more about understanding potential relationships between architecture and urban phenomena. And the output of a system like this might eventually drive the construction of a new physical reality. Each character was given a name, assigned the formal logic. It could be monolithic, striated, linear, and a medium of expression. We have characters that work with light, others with sound, other archenetics. These are just a few examples. Each character is also assigned a fiducial marker, and it's used to track its position and relationship to all the other characters. And what you see in the bottom left here on my side is a demonstration of the tracking system that translates the analog conditions, so these models in the physical world and puts that information into the computer. This is one of the characters. This one is the one imagined to have kinetic properties and the prototype is part of an investigation that looks into the reconfiguration of solid figures using the principle of a hinged dissection. In this case, a rectangular volume is dissected and unpacked to accommodate four rotations to shift the adjacencies of the parts and the effects that the overall piece produces at different stages of the transformation. One thing that I forgot to say but that I think it's very important is that the work that I'm showing today is a collection of things we do in the office at Ivanya Scheme, some material that is developed through the Immersive Kinematics Lab that my partner Simon Kim is the director of in Philadelphia, the Artifacts and Responsive Environments Lab that I am part of the GSD and some of the work we do with students. So many times we'll have an agenda that is researched in studios and that becomes a project that is extended for a year or longer depending on the findings that we have. So we're interested a lot in mobility and how architecture can be reconfigurable. So we're also using the principle of hinged dissections. We produced this prototype. This was part of the 2011 MOMA BS1 project, the YAN Architects Project that many of you might be familiar with. So the project was called the Mechanical Garden and it also uses the principle of a hinged dissection in this case at two scales, at the largest scale of the courtyard and at the scale of the component. The central idea, the way we kind of framed it for the presentation was to work on the ideas of the spectacle of urban life, the type of life that happens in the relationship between a center and a perimeter. So we wanted a courtyard and a colony which is, as you all know, a very kind of classical architectural typology but we wanted to actualize it with the technology that was available to us. So we also use characters in order to differentiate each structure unit from one to the other. The units are defined structurally and programmatically and each has a role in the formal definition of the project and in determining its compositional patterns. The structure was resolved through a series of the trihidrons that combine in various ways to create a tree-like structures. So we built this prototype at one-to-one that we actually brought to MOMA for our presentation and we switched it to five different configurations. The argument here was not that the pieces were going to move but there was a certain simplicity and economy of means to create the overall structure that was based on the principle that sub-similar units can combine in multiple ways. Now the tetras all vary. In this case we had five tetras to produce this prototype but the number of structured types to pick it out of them, it was quite interesting. We worked with Revolution Recovery which is a recycling center in Philadelphia that also offers artist residences and they're very much aligned to the sort of intellectually to this type of projects and they were to provide all the material transferred to the site and take it away if necessary but one part of the project was that these elements were also going to have a digital life and therefore we created this an app and an interface through which you could access the history and description of each one of the characters and then whoever was coming to the warm-up parties or to just visit the structure during the day they could add a photo of them on the site, et cetera, et cetera. The idea what we proposed was at the end of the summer when the structures are being disassembled each one of the trees could be auctioned and people could take them home. So this project is intended for the summer so they just need to produce a decent amount of shade and a structure for partying during the night. At another scale, we were interested in the type of rotations that I showed in the previous prototype and also a system of reconfiguration and in this case, this is a collaboration with a dance company called the Carbon Dance Theatre and we produced together the cybernetic performance between human and machines. The movement of the non-human elements which are these four robotic arms that you see hanging and the digital geometry that is projected in the back was considered as central and as important as the human dancers that were on the stage. The articulation of the robotic arm is designed through the adaptation of a system used in modular robotics. We work a lot with Mark Kim who's also a professor at University of Pennsylvania. His roboticist extraordinaire and he's the mind behind these devices that we use for several projects and as you can see, the degrees of freedom of these robots are in many cases quite limited but the type of effects that they can produce is quite large. We're interested in these projects because they allow us to very quickly test things. In architecture, everything takes a long time to build but then immediately we try to speculate what the implications might be for an architectural scale or in high-table space. So this is Polly House which is a project that uses the same modular robotics that you just saw in the videos and in the dance project but deployed into this idea of temporary shelter that we need the movement not only to deploy the units but also to adapt to different terrains. I'm gonna switch now to another grouping of projects but I wanted to put this slide up there because I always think it's good to know the lineages of the ideas and projects that we're interested in and I think the idea of what can be considered a space or an environment was definitely challenged by all of the architects we see here. We have Kupim and Blau and Hans Rookerco and Hans Hollane and I think many of these projects were not only derivations of the types of things we can imagine, this idea of kind of the utopian or the avant-garde project but they were also enabled by the technological advancements of the time and this is something that is very central to our work. What are the new technologies that we incorporate and in making things differently or designing things differently, new ideas of what projects might emerge. So the next batch of projects are connected through a particular geometrical study. We are very interested in cones and conic sections and arches and bolts and the types of figures that are kind of part of that language and how we can make them happen. So we did several projects that try to produce curvature starting from flatness. So the first project, this guy is APOC and it's a low-tech experiment particularly on assembly of parts. APOC started as a monocoque structure but because it's built with standard sized plywood sheets obviously we had to use multiple sheets and what they do is they panelize the sphere and it transformed the geometry that in the monocoque is continuous to a two-layer structure that is constructed with different panels. So needless to say, we're also very interested in the types of effects that this produces. When this is on an outside space, you can see through and suddenly you're confronted with kind of four layers rather than a single surface and these holes are not at all for decoration. It was the only way through which we could bend the plywood with mechanical force. We didn't use any chemical bending or heat or thermal bending or anything like that. So in the end, the formal strategy was so related to the ideas about how we were gonna put the parts together that all the documents we produced were always in a sense describing the same thing. Immediately after that we want another, that was a competition that we want to win that piece and immediately after that we also were invited to do this project at the Boston Society of Architects. It was a show called Smaller Than a Building Bigger Than a Bread Box. And the idea, it was very interesting because they gave us a lot of freedom in terms of what we wanted to show. They wanted to be something that we were thinking at the moment in the office and we were very much embedded in the world of wood. So we moved from an exterior to an interior and we produced step seven, which is this guy. And the idea is that this wood was going to be one of the most basic architectural elements, it's a wall. And this wall is designed to produce four conditions. A solid, a wall with a void inside, an occupiable space, and a cross. We were just interested in resolving all those problems. But at the same time we were interested in continuity. So how you can create those variations but still articulate them through continuity was one of the central agendas of the project. The room was also embedded with interactive elements and basically it was in the Boston Society of Architects and we knew what the main audience was going to be. So when you enter this chamber, there's a recording that receives the occupants that delivers messages on the principles of architecture. So we had seven recordings by Alto, Corbusier, Richard, Mies, Johnson, that would greet you on entering the room. And each recording lasted seven seconds. That was the time when the visitor was signaled that it was time to leave. But we were also interested in the fact that nothing could be said about this interactive experience from looking at the object. And this is a view from the street. You had to be in proximity to understand that it was an interactive element. Which is the opposite of this guy, which is another installation, another competition that we did last year in a place called the London D also in Boston. They have this event here that is called Play Day, which is supposed to produce structures for kids to play in. So in this case, what we did is connecting the material effects with the performance and the interaction. So we developed these cones and each one was embedded with either a microphone or a speaker or a sensor. And so the users will whisper their secrets into them and then the code will distort and amplify the signal and that will be shared at very loud volumes with everybody that was around it without exactly knowing who was giving that message. And there were a lot of kids so we got a lot of, hello, is this working? So we didn't get anything very profound in terms of message, but we were interested in this idea of materiality and interaction and how to put them together and how intuitively can you understand how things work just by kind of looking at them and engaging with them. This was the final piece at night. So the piece was magenta when recording and blue when speaking. So somehow it acquired some of this kind of life or a life like characteristics. This is, I wanted to show this it moves me to the also ideas of what is the model, what is the prototype and what is the project. This is a prototype that a CC student of mine a few years ago has produced at the GSD. His name is Jeremy G. And he was also working with arcs and bolts and arches. So this was just one unit of space. And so that was a prototype and I would say these are models, these are these little cubes. And the project at the end was the landscape of bolts and the prototype was one amongst many primers that were proposed to establish a systems of units that can be proliferated. So in this case, the prototype was testing structural performance, general form, how to bend the plastic material but the models are testing something completely different like edge conditions, density scale, formal range and strategies for multiplication. So it's not that one is really better than the other but we could definitely argue that they have different functions within the design process. So this idea of multiplication beyond the material component is also something we're very interested in how to move away from the area that everything is reduced to a pixel. And we tested it in these projects, the DC loci also at an urban scale. And so we do a lot of these type of projects, we invent them, we do a narrative. So by now we have I think we're on our fifth city. So it's related to the Philadelphia mass projects that I showed before. It starts actually with the original plan for Washington where on a square-based grid you introduce these diagonals as boulevards to connect the spaces of power. And we try to disrupt these boulevards and the connections that they make by transforming them by reconfiguring them through the pressure of architectural agents. And the agents are resolved also as a collection of architectural structures that are deployed throughout the city plan which are these guys that while they operate autonomously they also have the capacity to produce global change. So these guys are also like a 15 by 15 by 15 boxes and we could argue that at this scale they are models but they're associated to a lot of behaviors in terms of design speculation but in the computation that you will see in a minute. So the definition of this multi-agent system has the objective to redefine the overall organization of the city. So what you see now are graphic rules that describe internal relationships and potentials for transformation. As agents they don't have a scale, they have behaviors and relationships to a hypothetical context. And this is one of the drawings that we use to imagine what that city may look like. And again we transform those models into active elements just by connecting them to a digital interface and figuring out what it might produce. So again the objective is not to transform the city map but to transform analog condition into a digital signal and then with that information you can basically do whatever you want. Now I'm gonna go a little bit back and I apologize for the old school render on the screen that's one of the images from my thesis at DAA that I was based on responsive environments and I'm showing this very quickly because it was really at that point that I started using prototypes and discovering the potential for using those prototypes. The project was in the terminal for AdHetro airports and we basically translated the functions of the airports into an input and output system that produce different materials. So I would only focus on the materiality aspect. The proposition creates this material that starts as a flat sheet that has a very specific striation and when the sheet is unfolded, basically it's very flexible. By the moment you put a lateral pressure it becomes a honeycomb surface that can be basically load bearing. And this was actuated and also somehow computed to understand the mechanical forces of the project and to kinda properly test it. So a prototype was produced to investigate the mechanical behavior of the cells and the neighboring conditions that were necessary to constrain the formal transformation but also to understand the conditions from material failure. Like many times I think it's very easy to model these things in the digital world but then when you build them physically you realize that the problems that you're facing are absolutely different. So that's why prototyping has been very central. We also layered a system of augmentation which is another sort of digital interest that we have in the office and turned it into a displaced surface. These are some of the projects that I developed in a course that I teach from time to time at the GSD that is called Augmented Environments. And that looks at the tectonic and spatial transformations and implications that can occur through augmentation. So yeah, I need to go fast. Okay, I'm gonna go through several slides fast. Wearables, I just wanted to show this project and maybe we'll end with this one because the scale of the body is something that is very central in testing ideas about space. So this is a collaboration we did with Oprah Philadelphia. They were concerned about the future of the genre and they're losing audience or younger people and not necessarily being connected to the world and history of Oprah. So they called us to do something with them and we did the first staging of Orpheus and Eurydice. In particular, we focused on the snake and in the last act kills Eurydice, like Oprah and Spaulding and for anybody that wants to see it. So we created this soft robotic snake and this guy is a prototype. And so basically the unit itself is made out of silicone and it has air channels where we pump the air and that allows us to produce mobility. And the resulting motion allows for a very supple, very organic transformation and at the same time, like a great change in a very kind of tight space. And then we always want to know what can we do with architecture? So if we were to proliferate all of these units and create a field of them, these elements will behave kind of like a field of wheat because they're pneumatic and they also can be inflated. We can very easily imagine kind of like a closed environment. So I just put it, I'm not gonna describe the next project, that was the last project, but I wanna kind of very quickly go through some of these images that bring out other issues of fabrication, again projects that are on the design table at the moment, et cetera, et cetera. And again, how to transform models into prototypes and maybe just for later, for the conversation, I'm just gonna end in this image. That is kind of, I wrote this down, so I'm gonna reach this piece that was trying to offer a position on the issue of making a process that I think Josh was interesting in discussing. So what I was wondering if a project is ever not a prototype, in architecture, we don't tend to repeat our buildings exactly as we design them or vice versa. And as technology advances or makes available new possibilities for materials and their manipulation, the process and the projects can become one and the same. And I'm just gonna stop there. Thank you. That was great. That was awesome. It was amazing, amazing body of work. Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for allowing me to share Karen Timberlake's way of making. So I have a question for you. This is the definition of the word. Anyone? Actual application or use of idea, belief or method as opposed to theories about such application or use. Okay, it's not a test. I know for many of you, first aid of school, architecture, yeah, it's not a test. What's the word? What does this describe? Practice. Yes, it describes practice. That's right. I'm going to show you practices, practices. I liken this definition that it says as opposed to theories as kind of a restive phrase, maybe suggesting a little confativeness about what we mean by theories as opposed to application. But regardless, I think in the context of making, something that you're about to do for those of you who are new here to this program or something that I do actually quite often is I challenge my rituals, my habits, my methods, my practices. I think about, we think about as a practice what near future practices might be. What are those things we need to go out and find and interrogate and look into? That is what we're all about when it comes to making. Making. Sometimes it sends us into directions that we don't expect. So they're about, I don't know, maybe 90 plus people on the slide. There are more people in this audience, but this is a collection of images of most of the people that are practicing are not there anymore. Some are very much there. This image begins to suggest that each individual person on this side has a way of orienting themselves to rituals, beliefs, habits, methods, that they bring with them some way or orientation to making. That's really, really important. Most of the people on the slide are trained as architects, meaning they're trained in the design process. They have a way of looking at something and going through it again and again, using the design process to make. That's not true for everyone that's here. Some people here are trained in other ways of thinking, other methods. Integrated into this group are individuals who are trained in thinking about, for instance, the first principles of thermodynamics, meaning they have a way of seeing and thinking about the way things get hot and cold and how things move, and they wanna leverage that into the making process. Others here are trained in or have ways of thinking that come from urban ecology or environmental management. They're working at really large scales. Others are coming from very small scales. They have actually appropriated ways of thinking from material science. The majority are designers. About 15 individuals on the slide have hybrid brains. Some of you are coming from backgrounds. Is this right? Coming from backgrounds that I just mentioned, is that true? Anyone in here coming from material science or engineering or any of those other backgrounds now? Some people on the side are coming from sculpture that came from sculpture. My point is that in our practice, in our practice what we've purposely done is we've set up what we call a transdisciplinary practice that we came to a decision in order to sufficiently see architecture for what it is, we need to acknowledge that we had to leverage ways of thinking and making from other fields, methods from other fields, and so we began to put together a practice that legitimizes those other methods. This also means that we have a way of going after day-to-day activities that often in my training I wasn't going after. I wasn't using certain methods, and so for this talk and some of the things I'm gonna show you, it's really about what we do on a day-to-day by-day basis. Now this is where we work. This is a space that we work in upstairs in our office in Philadelphia. One of the other things that we've realized about this space and about space in general is not only do we have to design the relationship between each other and our methods, but the way that we communicate with each other and what you see over the course of the day is a lot of conversations happening in our office. A lot of people getting up out of their seats, walking over to each other, talking, working through things, grouping, regrouping, reforming again. Downstairs what you would see is some things slightly different. You'd see a big shop, people going downstairs making in that shop. You'd see another pin where we have a tendency to make hardware. There's a lot of things happening on this floor plate. There's a lot of conversations that are happening about what's being made on those screens. Now we do do projects. And a lot of those projects look like buildings, but the more we make, the more we realize that it's easier for us to say we do projects. So our projects look like buildings, but they also look like building envelope technologies. They also look like discrete pieces of hardware. They also look like very specific described workflows in order to go do something. They also look like software. We do projects. That allows us to begin to legitimize all of the different ways in which we could make. When we do projects, we have a tendency to go after on a day-by-day basis really different ways to leverage all that collective intelligence. We might work in large groups. We might work through brainstorming. We might work specifically on our computers on very specific types of scripts. We work on things that are incredibly small. We work on things that are incredibly large. We work on projects that are about logistics. We work on a whole range of things, but what we've learned to do is not discriminate and just tend to work towards buildings, but really tend to work into and lean into those types of smaller things, working out those types of smaller things and legitimizing the smaller things like how you get a truck up a hill in order to lay a pre-fibro-cadie unit, how you measure at a very high density, very specific environmental flows, such as temperature and relative humidity in a space. Can we do that? Can we make that ourselves? We do this and we do that. Now, it should come as no surprise that if we have individuals in our office that are trained in other ways of thinking, and to be fair, I have to say this. I have to say this. When we began going down this road of putting together more transdisciplinarity and integrating that more into our office, there was always a question about, who would join us? Who would join us? So yes, we have been a practice of making architecture for 30 years, but when we really wanted to go out and find someone who had a background in chemical physics, who was going to join us to do that? And to be fair, I should say that many of the people who decided to join us and now form what Josh referred to as our research group, they not only are trained in those things, but they also are trained, many of them are trained in architecture. So they decided to leverage both what they, all of the accumulated knowledge and methods that they had in a previous degree and put that together with all of the methods that they work through in an architectural degree and bring that forward into a way of making. So it should come as no surprise that one of the things that connects all of us together when we go to work on something day by day by day is the question mark. The question mark is essential piece of infrastructure. I say this again and again. It's an essential piece of infrastructure that links various different ways of thinking in our office. And if you were to walk into our office and you could go up to anyone in our office, any one of us, and you could ask us, what's the question you're answering today? What are you working on today? I wanna submit to you that when you go about design, you may have and you likely have a whole range of unarticulated questions that you're asking when you're designing. You're applying those ideas, beliefs, new appropriated methods, things you're going to test out and try, try on when you go to make, you're going to use those in order to answer those questions. Challenges to articulate those questions. We found that in our practice, we have to articulate those questions. When you read through this list of questions, what is hourly thermal comfort profile of the space? Which factors best characterize the site? Can we locate and measure a multitude of spatiotemporal urban microclimates? When you read these, what you should know, again, as I'm showing you something that happens on a day-by-day basis, I'm not showing you a finished project. What we've learned is that it's the choices we make on a day-by-day basis to go after these types of inputs for design that helps us understand what our ideas and beliefs and methods are. More and more, it helps us refine them. But you can see, as you look across this list of questions, that if we really are to go after answering them, then we have to leverage methods that we might, in fact, be a little uncomfortable with. So on a day-by-day basis, again, not finished projects. Sometimes it's uncomfortable for me to not show you the finished projects. I want to show you these methods on a day-by-day basis. We might be working on, and actually, are actively working on the development of highly granular sensor network that we can use to measure a whole range of things. In the top row, what you see are those white boxes covered a little bit in snow. That's simply asking the question about the relationship between form, form generation, and real-time feedback of temperature. Inside those boxes is a whole differentiated interior that's attempting to say something about the inner relationship between form and temperature and feedback that people are getting from the sensors that are in the box. Going down that top row, what you're seeing there in the flickering purple pixelated image is the same type of sensor technology applied to a green roof in a grid. We're trying to understand something there about the temperature of the soil, the moisture of the soil. We're trying to understand something about the vegetation and relationship to all of that in order to begin to understand how we design with plants as much as the form and shape of a roof. Then on the very opposite end of the top row, you have a sensor being put directly on a building. In our day-to-day practices, we find that we have to go out, get data, interpret it, determine if it's actionable, and then use that as inputs for design. In the second row down, we've gone after deploying weather stations. Now it would be impressive if I said it's the big, light, drum circular thing, it's not. It's the tiny little thing up on the top with anemometer, but we go after putting weather stations here. It's on a very, very tall building. And we're simply asking a question there about the context of wind on the site, trying to gather data before we design in order to determine whether or not those inputs really help us when we're about form and performance generation. In the center too, we have people taking surveys on site, and I'm gonna show you a little bit more about those two projects. And again, on the very end there in the second row, that image is also showing something about the interrelationship between the data that we've collected and our ability to see and comprehend exactly what's happening in that microclimate. We've gone after inputs for models specifically in this row, for models specifically. For instance, in this image right here, we were really interested in the relationship between data about climate, specifically precipitation and sun. And we wanted to understand whether or not we can begin to tinker up a model where the relationship between precipitation, sun patterns, and then wood, wood in the way that it colors through the interaction with rain and sun if we could actually begin building up a simulation environment that allows us to predict the weathering and the weathering patterns on a wood building over time. So we go after a lot of this information in order to act as inputs into our simulation process. We go after the type of information that allows us to think about time as it is real. In this image here, what we're going after is information on the way that trees grow over time and the way that that data allows us to understand something about the building that we're going to put there. We go after the creation of software, which is the next image down. And then in the end, we've had a very longstanding dissection of the application of VR, not in a way to visualize projects per se, but a way to experience them and also a way to layer in analysis and question asking into a shared environment. Much of what we also do has to do with putting out or with creating physical prototypes. Some of the tests are singular. For instance, here we have a test where we were simply trying to bait birds, literally get them to roost on these different shapes in order to understand something about the relationship between the geometry of a thing and the way that a bird lands on it so that we could begin to explore the right shape or form for a roof. The next image, we have this tendency to create a whole series of apparatuses that allow us to test certain properties of materials. We've gone through a whole range of material studies in our practice over its history. Formulation of different types of concrete is something that we have a longstanding relationship with as well. And then obviously the very end is a very large-scale prototype that is based on much of the formulation work that we did, that large-scale prototype happens to incorporate in it four different mixed designs testing the way in which someone handled each of those different pieces of building and then how that entire thing was assembled. I show you this because I really have come to appreciate the way in which I need to and we need to slow down and really look at the methods that we're using and the ideas and beliefs that we're based on. There's so many ways to approach the dissection of the phenomena around us. Can we dissect that phenomena? Can we see things for what they are? And can we then be courageous enough to use that and think through that and imagine what we see as vital inputs for design. In this project, it's a survey. It's a survey of an existing roof. And simply what you see here is a member of Karen Tenderlick who happens to have a background in architecture and anthropology and urban ecology. And the question was simple. The question that we asked was, what's going on up there? We had designed this roof. It seems like a really straightforward thing to ask. What's going on up on this roof? It would be one thing to say we asked this because we were interested in maintenance of the roof. Well, that's actually not quite right. What we were really interested in is the inner relationship between the configuration of the vegetation on that roof that you see right here. The configuration as it was initially planned and the way in which that thin ecological layer actually has a mechanism by which it changes over time through the contribution of wind-driven seeds and birds. There is a way in which this ecological layer changes over time. Could we represent this to ourselves? And more than that, when we study the mechanisms that allow certain species on this roof to thrive and others to die out, could we then begin to understand the inner relationship between the form of that roof because it does have a form. It's not simply fat flat. It has a purposeful form. Could we understand the relationship of the form of that roof to the pattern of vegetation, to the way in which that entire roof actually participates in something else happening inside the building that has to do with how it operates thermally? In other words, what we were trying to do in this project is yes, okay, we understood something about the vegetation, but we were also trying to understand whether or not we saw the design problem clearly. Did we sufficiently understand the inputs in order to design this roof? What we found is that seven species were planted. Seven years later, 65 species were there. The initial pattern was hardly recognizable. And going forward, we now have a way of thinking about the palette of vegetation in relationship to form a bit differently. We also have a tendency to dig into things. I mentioned this in the top two rows, things about weather and climate. One of the things that we've learned that we've come a little obsessed with, maybe a little too obsessed with is the fact that the weather down here, the climate down here, climate's different in weather, but what's happening down here and all the data I can get down here in Philadelphia's airport, because we're based in Philadelphia, is different than what's actually happening in the center of the city. An impacted site overshaded by buildings is very different than a site down at the airport. That's something that we've learned. We've also learned that we have to have a better way of characterizing those sites. So part of our work and part of our goal in describing these methods and being really careful about the day to day and the inputs for design has to do with collecting data on sites. And here you see a custom app that we built that allows us to go into a site where we had a project and begin to collect data about the relationship between people, what they were doing, the materials that they were sitting on, the microclimate regimes that they were engaging. We were trying to understand the correlations between all of those things, but more importantly, began to start a dialogue about the factors that contribute to urban space in such a way that we could begin to describe the inputs for this project. The question that you'll be asking, that I'll be asking, that our firm asks continuously is what is our agency? And what I mean by that is what is mine? What is your capacity to act in the world as a designer? Something that we've shown you in this briefest snapshot is that it has a lot to do with how we define our power, our power, what I mean is the ability or act to produce an effect. What I'm suggesting is that when one designs, when I design, when you design, our power lies in the inscription of a boundary around what will and will not participate in the design process. That's where the methods come in. You have the power to draw a boundary around what will and will not participate in the design process. How will you use that power? Will you sufficiently see and comprehend the range of design accurately? We're all going to be challenged. You're going to be challenged to appropriate ideas, beliefs, methods, practices. All of those will contribute to drawing these types of boundaries. Our goal has been to draw that boundary with some degree of consciousness. Thank you. That's me. I'm not an architect. I'm a visual artist. I generally don't really solve any problem. Mostly very good in creating problems. That's mostly what I do. And I guess kind of follow obsessions in a way or another. I'm very interested in systems. Generally systems is what kind of guide, what I do, how I develop my projects. Kind of developing systems as a way to help me look at the world in a different way. Something that has to do in a way with vision and experience. Today I'm going to show you a sort of, we'll try to be very brief, but no, well, I'm going to do that. But I'm going to show you a sort of kind of organic development of a project, of a certain obsession that I have and I'll develop sort of over the years or maybe I don't know, 12, 13 years is kind of something that I generally do. Each project is not really a separate entity. Rather I'm interested in these kind of themes that I tend to explore for very long time. I'm from Rome originally. And I sort of escaped from home at 19 years old to go to London. I thought it would be a much more interesting place where I still live now. But somehow I started becoming incredibly fascinated by the sort of very things that I kind of escaped from. So in a way I could kind of never fully escape in a way. The idea of sort of classic iconography, history and art, certain kind of arts and something that I really kind of got me really obsessed. Almost if like leaving Rome was a way to kind of detach from these images, these narratives and connect again with them in a very different way. This idea of detachment, it's a very kind of crucial thing in what I do. I started sort of capturing these spaces not so much photographically in a way that is kind of similar to the sort of lived experience. In fact, I wanted to go in a sort of furthest possible way from the lived experience of someone entering such space. Started to kind of recreate these physical spaces digitally and then observe them in a digital realm essentially. Explore them digitally in ways that couldn't be really explored or experienced physically. That's my old yo. This doesn't quite make sense with that audio. Can I have audio? Yeah, very good. Sort of playing with animation and making these sort of videos, they're not really kind of linear experiences. I was actually more interested in creating sort of objects of contemplation. Something that in a way is then experience on kind of going back to this idea of an architectural scale. Something that then becomes very, very physical. I've asked to put the audio quite loud because I think that's you start getting this kind of sense of physicality in a way. So on one side I work with very ephemeral things, this kind of digital artworks, but the way these artworks are displayed it's quite crucial. So the several installations I've done in several kind of historical locations or different museums, but in a way the relationship between this digital object and the kind of physical space around you it's somehow something very, very crucial. The same time I also became very interested in exploring on a sort of more microscopic scale these artworks and looking at museums collections, looking at paintings again in ways that you generally don't really do with your normal kind of vision. Trying to scan these paintings at incredible resolutions that becomes essentially architectural sites. They become landscapes that you can explore. Well I do many different things. Some works, some of these digital processes are I guess printed, some becomes media installations, some becomes sculptures. I mean you will see this over the course of these slides. But essentially my idea is to, and I'll take this kind of opposites in a way, like you see in these slides you have this sort of figurative painting on one side and on the other you have this digital abstraction. Almost the opposites on this kind of scale of our visual languages, but because of how these images are generated essentially they share the very same rules. So they end up becoming on one side the very same thing, but removing this kind of historical narrative in a way almost stripping these images of this kind of iconographic layer and just really study certain dynamics, certain forces, and so on. Where this collection is present and then the work was again shown in the actual space. Again as I was saying I'm interested in creating these sort of objects of contemplation. So it's something that on one side it's really ephemeral but actually has a sort of physicality. It becomes something that you don't really explore through time but also through space. As I was saying about systems before, I mean there's been a sort of old development of how I started observing these masterpieces and these historical stuff and developing more and more into using computational systems to sort of analyze, retrieve data and use these data to actually generate what you see. So it's not a process where I look at something and I get inspired and I just draw it or rather use the eyes of the machine almost as an opportunity to detach from these things, to detach from the way I would look at these stuff. To somehow find a way to remove these kind of narratives and look at the sort of pure visual characteristics of an object. And this process then become many different things. I'm quite interested in this idea of playing with data from something physical to something digital to again become something physical. This one is sort of staying in the steel plate with these diagrams etched. It's almost in a way a kind of imaginary archeological finding. That's how I kind of like to see these works. Almost something when you see these sort of preparatory drawings, something. This is something I've kind of been experimenting recently. Sorry, becoming really obsessed with this synoptia. Our base is kind of ancient sort of preparatory drawings that are behind frescoes and so on. It's almost a kind of bare instructions for what the painting was going to be. The start of developing this project, I mean this is a, well, it's a shit photo. It's just taken with my mobile a couple of days ago of this thing that just came out from the framing. But essentially it's a canvas that has been sort of etched with a laser cutter. Essentially drawing with a laser on a canvas. And you cannot get this color that is very similar to these sort of preparatory drawings in a way. I'm quite interested in the end in developing objects that they are not just the documentation of a process but somehow they end up becoming an object that speaks for itself. So this is a sort of new series that hopefully will flourish. Don't look at me like this, I'm gonna go faster. I, no, I'm trying my best because I have a way sort of usually to explain things that is very slow, you know, I'm Italian so I don't kind of go right to the point. But there's many different things I'm sort of obsessed with and kind of different series that I've explored today as short time and kind of talking about mostly this idea of history. But I think nature is always in a way here and there, something that also gets very much inspired. And as I was saying, I started building this idea of this imaginary kind of archeological artifacts. Basically this idea of how time plays a role into these objects, somehow embeds a sort of process. I started looking at these very interesting scholar stones from kind of, I mean, old Chinese practice of collecting these objects that embed a certain kind of complexity, complexity generally given by these kind of processes of nature that are so much bigger that what we can perceive in a way, a very different kind of scale of time. And this effect of time is something for me very, very fascinating. Probably also by growing up in Rome, I guess, that's kind of city sort of being layered, you know, with this, what is fascinating also though by these objects is that also being modified by hand. Somehow following the kind of inner structure of the original stone. So today we have these objects that we don't quite know what is like made by nature, what is made by man. So I find it very fascinating in a way. You have this kind of geological process that then seamlessly continued by, maybe not an artist at the time, but in a way someone that kind of grabbed this and so on. And sort of this leads me into this kind of crazy project that I've been doing now for a few years that is really inspired by these guys here. These are unfinished sculptures from Michelangelo back in the Renaissance times in Italy. They became very, very iconic because I guess they were left unfinished and somehow by being unfinished, they expressed something completely different. There are many stories, I mean in the end basically this commission kind of dropped and so it didn't finish them. But I like to think of this more romantic version of the story where it didn't finish them because at some point they realized that really they imported me. There wasn't so much about the figure, about what these guys are doing but the articulation of matter itself. This kind of idea of this object that goes through this geological process and then at some point is then touched again by man. This kind of relationship between man and nature or let's say these different type of languages that merge. So there's something so special for me about these objects that I kind of started playing around with this. I'm interested in the figure. I'm actually interested in the space between the figure and the edge of this block. Essentially that's the sort of site that I explore and I've been developing some systems to kind of explore this space. And well systems and different kind of processes not just to generate a geometry but actually generate a sort of narrative of how you go from the block to this certain stage in a way. So these sort of elements of time of how you actually sculpt this object. And started going very into designing, I mean, million different versions of my own character. I thought there was another slide so I'm actually trying to do it. These studies, they basically became instructions for these machines to actually sculpt these objects for real. And again, even now, I mean, the whole process of how this stuff is made is not so much about designing a geometry and then finding a way to manufacture this but actually it's not doing both at the same time. Essentially developing this kind of narrative of how you cut through these blocks. So these are a few pieces that have been made over the years. This one was in Seoul in Korea. The Seoul Museum of Art. It was kind of a fascinating experience where then I worked with some local crazy robot people. This one was a recent one in Berlin. And this kind was leading into this sort of new project where I started becoming so fascinated by these machines that at some point I started exhibiting the machine itself. I went into this kind of crazy idea of doing this and this is not really kind of machine that you generally take around so easily. So we basically built this sort of five tons kind of portable plug and play huge milling setup that essentially is kind of loaded on the truck then unloaded into a place and you can literally start milling the stuff that we designed. And this, I mean, it's a recent, I've been working on this for a very long time but now finally started being shown this summer in Berlin, like this one. And then yesterday opened in Linz. This was another shit photo with my mobile when we were kind of cleaning this install but this at the moment is running now. So again, the project is really on one side started developing a lot into the processes and the actors cutting again into this kind of concept of time of how this matter changes. I'll do it with time, a little bit. All right. Well, on the other hand, that's a lot of ideas that kind of sparked by this design research that I started also exploring sculptures in different ways. And this is another subject I started getting quite interested on. Mostly on this idea that I was developing these researches where you have essentially two different objects that they kind of interact with one another. At some point, I really wanted to start working with a sculpture that already at its core design had these kind of elements of tension in a way. So I started working with Delacun, which also is fascinating enough. It's one of the most studied objects in the history of art, one of the most copied and so on. So I was kind of interested in kind of going back to this tradition of studying Delacun almost as this sort of principle of how you would generate something perfect in a way. But basically replacing parts of these sculptural groups with actually completely different geometries and then having sort of different kind of relationship, again, stripping it out of this sort of narrative and developing kind of endless variations then. So you sort of keep the principle of what that statue of that kind of action is, but again, replacing completely the narrative. So this one is also a sculpture that's been made recently. As you can see, this one is much more complex and it's a different kind of application process where it's done into different parts. And this one also, it's done in a special material that we came out with after a few tests, which essentially is like pulverized marble and kind of very little sort of epochs just keep it together. So it's sort of not just a robot kneeling, you know, a block of material, but it's something slightly more complex. So this one is in fact actually in Rome at the moment, which will be shown in October. And that's also where the Lacoon is. So I kind of like this. I have one tiny thing and then I re-go, but I guess it's kind of connected also with this idea of the Lacoon. And again, this idea of this sort of imaginary archeological findings that started to become more and more an obsession. But also what is fascinating about the Lacoon is that when it was found, there was one part that was missing. And basically there's been a debate that was like lasted centuries about the position of this arm and in a way each person was saying a different thing. And in a way this is a bit the history of Rome, this idea of these kind of artifacts that are found everywhere that somehow document this history that is not there anymore. There's something quite fascinating about these just these broken things. So it started again developing different system to generate fragments of the Lacoon, essentially simulating some kind of fracture processes and then having these objects then made into this kind of sort of imaginary archeological findings. So in this one's original you were 3D printed and then molded and then also using another kind of sort of custom made material with essentially made with like iron powder. So the whole actual patina is actually a real sort of rust but then it's, well. And yeah, I guess it's kind of strange because it started from these sort of very ephemeral things and then you end up with these sculptures but everything happens through these sort of digital systems. I mean everything I touch pretty much break. I don't really want to put my hand into anything at all that is being produced. What I do essentially I think about systems. And so for me it doesn't really matter if then at some point something becomes physical or it stays completely virtual. In fact, I don't really see much difference the way I operate between one and the other. And I guess yeah, it's maybe not too smart. Another conversation. Thank you. Thanks everyone. I'm gonna invite the three of our speakers up to our little seats up here. Ask a few pointed questions. So I'm gonna join you and share a mic in a moment and not do the talk show of those things the whole time. But maybe in the interest of getting a question that applies to everybody. And a good place to start. Maybe I'll throw this question to Crayola first and other panelists can respond. All of our presenters have something to do with either the old and the new or maybe Mariana called it the analog and the digital. And I think it was even echoed in the way that Billy spoke about the, as opposed to part of your definition that when we talk about bringing making to GSAP which is something that we're doing it simultaneously means something like we're going to immerse ourselves in digital technologies and fabrication making as much as possible and push it as far as possible. And there's also making as a sort of resistance to that as well. So that's why we talk about craft at the same time and that there's some sort of expertise or material expertise that exists only there. And then one of our goals is to try to investigate that tension and maybe break it down or see where it goes. So maybe I'd ask you how that back and forth sort of and I know you spoke about it in a lot of ways but maybe again how that back and forth sort of informs your work or how it challenges it. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an interesting question because in the end when computers came along the idea was that it was something to kind of help us do what we were kind of already doing solving our problems starting to be closer and closer to how we think that somehow. Something interesting is happening that we're meeting somewhere in the middle. So we are also starting to be inspired by technology itself but this kind of different way of seeing of operating of making things. And for me again moving from this digital I mean ecosystem to this like physical stuff has been quite very very inspiring because in a way I started to use in these machines in a way that just to produce what I was designing on a computer and at some point it started to became like a sort of feedback loop where some of the sort of inherited aesthetics and language of the machine itself it started to feed back into the design process. And I think again then for me it's not really a tool or rather is a language in a way. So a lot of the digital stuff that you saw they were playing with this idea of resolution in a way or another these geometries that start having this kind of dynamic resolutions and somehow different type of resolutions. And this topic is going back to the sculptures but the resolution is not of the mesh. It's actually of the toolpaths that these operations how these operations are made. So some of the principles maybe of how I design are somehow the same but just use different kind of logic. So I think it's interesting this sort of feedback loop for me and the machine using the language of the machine itself I think. So I know everybody come to our fab shop tutorials where we talk all about toolpaths later this semester. Maybe I'll flip that comment to Mariana next to you. Have a really distinct interchange between your digital modeling and the actual material properties. So we see the torquing spheres model and we imagine that it exists in Rhino at some point but they're like maybe where do you find the something that we try to explore a lot is the translation of those processes. I think studio is actually primarily about that and about maybe the gaps. I didn't show torquing spheres today but I think that applies to many other projects. And I think it follows quite closely to what biology has said that if somebody still thinks that a computation or digital processes are just, or maybe for some people are it means to make faster or optimize some sort of design processes. For us we don't really see it that way. We are interested in the type of agency and ideas that emerge from understanding how digital environments and machines work. But I think it is true that in many projects going more directly to your question is that we discover that in many projects we cannot model in a digital environment with absolute accuracy. So the digital model is always an approximation to the physical and the physical is always an approximation to the digital and each one of those realms have difficulty. So in the torquing spheres projects that we were also mechanically bending wood we couldn't just exactly predict the form that the wood was gonna take because there are certain imperfections in the fabrication systems even if we were using kind of robotic fabrication, et cetera, et cetera. So those type of distinctions for us is also a site for discovery and a site for invention where we understand that each one of those domains is going to produce or reveal something new about the piece. So the piece is not, the piece in the digital environment is as relevant and as true as the piece in the physical space and each one of those have different properties that we find interesting for different reasons. Maybe on, sort of on that note and going to Billy, everybody, and it's something that we also work on every time in studio, but it seems like we've talked a lot today about designing process and designing process as a sort of act that's as important as design or product or anything else you wanna call it. So I guess the question is when you feel like you've located a process or you feel like you're doing something that's important and central, how do you codify that? How do you take that with you to other projects in a way that's flexible, just like you said, we don't do anything twice? Or do you? Or maybe how does that come into your work? The preserving workflows in one sense but also just great thinking. I think what's, I'm gonna try to hold that question in my head. The answers that you just heard to all these questions point out the fact that the way in which we're talking about using these tools trends towards a non-linear as opposed to a linear narrative. You've just said, I'm not using the tools in order to produce something. Like it's not about production, it's actually about feedback. So that means that the act of investigation actually begins to modify the interrelationship between all of the different outcomes and outcomes could be a physical artifact instantiated with material or it can be a digital artifact instantiated with code. And in our work, what we find is it would be nice in a managerial sense and it's a word I use maybe a little sarcastically in a managerial sense to say, yes, we've come up with protocols about how to research this thing and now we're going to pass them to you and you're gonna use them. That's not quite what we do at all. In fact, what happens because we're so driven by seeing things clearly for what they are is that we have a tendency to understand the way in which we've described a search space in a multivariant problem in one instance for one instantiation, learn from that process and understand as much about the platform, the digital platform we're working on as it is about the communication platform between people but then take that experience and move it directly into the next instantiation which often requires us to yeah, maybe learn something from before but also modify it again. I mean, for us, it's also not a matter of optimizing, describing workflows, putting them into a manual and saying from henceforth, they'll shall do this, this, this. It's actually about investigation. It's always very complicated. It's very complicated and it's a really wonderful process to participate in. I think that's what the work really shows. It's a process of discovery and investigation no matter what it might look like from the outside. There is a process of discovery and investigation in each of the bodies of work that I see. I kind of add some things that I think oftentimes the question of design techniques comes up both in pedagogy, school, academic environments and in work and I think somehow it seems that we all share this idea that we're not just developing these tools to do things that not only the process of discoveries or the agency embedded in these processes this is like that is the design in many cases and even though you might produce simultaneously tools to produce or elements that are repeatable or protocol so obviously you develop knowledge. The fifth project you do with similar ideas or similar materials that knowledge activates and those things are repeatable but each project also either has the capacity to transform those tools or to kind of take them to another level so they're not just techniques. Yeah I mean this I think way of working in a way for me cannot really be separated by the idea of obsession in a way. I mean for what I do at least in the way I work I think obsession it's quite a sort of crucial point. It's not that so much you are developing a coherent way forward because it's sometimes madness to get into this kind of feedback loop for so long. So I think in a way at least what I do obsession is pretty much I think you came to the right place. But yeah I think this is also interesting to exchange because a lot of the people here are actually new starting now and a lot of the stuff that you saw maybe are the result of many years of these kind of iterations. I think for me essentially just the result of obsessions or something that you keep researching and go deeper and deeper and deeper by looking at the same thing. So it takes a long time I think to generate these kind of languages. Maybe another important thing that we have to touch on that came up really strongly in everybody's work is collaboration. I think one maybe speaking from the position of somebody who's a charge of the fab shop now and it's vision whatever that means is that part of that for everybody involved in the conversation is that the fab shop doesn't only have to have the right machines and techniques but it has to turn into sort of a hub for information and expertise which means reaching out to other people in the city who are involved in fabrication or just have expertise in the things that we want to do and bringing them in anyway we can. Part of it is that we don't have any space here but I think that we believe that understanding process means incorporating those other people's expertise but we haven't fully explored that in the context of the fab shop. So maybe how, this is a question for everybody I guess, how has your work by desire or by necessity brought into the fall of those outside collaborators and those expertise like where does that fall in your design process? It's a big question. Well I mean for us what we ultimately decided to do was to bring people we may have before decided we'd go out and seek, we decided to legitimize those ways of thinking as part of design process challenging the very definition of a designer or challenging our own preconceived notions of who a designer is and at what scales we design and what time scales we design. So we are very practices like I showed set up around this notion that we have to work from a point of view of collaboration and collective intelligence. Often we find ourselves in predicaments where we need other types of knowledge and other methods and we simply go out and seek them but always bringing individuals into a conversation around that which we're attempting to make or to do. It's essential. Like I realized after nine years of, my prior background is in academia, very small practice. Now in the practice of a hundred individuals leveraging knowledge across, I realized I would have a very hard time not existing in a collective intelligence model right now. I'd be lost. For me as well, it's like something I didn't say but a crucial aspect of what I do is this sort of collaborative approach. I mean sometimes you might have noticed that I say hi, sometimes I say we, it's kind of a big feud in the sense because I don't have a studio, I more have a sort of network of international people kind of spread around the world that I work with sometime locally or I fly them over somewhere, sometimes in the middle of the countryside for a week to develop something or sometimes we just work over the internet and so on. So I think when you work with technology and in certain ways things get very complex and if you don't wanna get distracted too much by the problems in a way you need to work with people that spend their own life trying to solve those very big problems. So you work a lot with programmers and with robotics engineers and I mean with many different people. I think what is challenging though is what language you speak because in the end if you want to infuse your vision into somewhere else's mind it's not so easy and I think I said in the beginning this idea of developing systems is actually once you develop a system in a way then it's much easier for also people to grasp the mechanics of what I want to do. So somehow this is becoming a little bit the sort of core body's collaborations work. Very clear definition of a system that I want to use to research a given subject. So like instead of writing a sort of script on a movie I write the kind of variables of the system, at least the parameters that I want to explore in a given system and this kind of becomes the base for such conversations. For us it's the same I would say collaboration is everywhere and we have probably in rough turns two types of collaborations, a conventional model of consultancy that happens in architecture a lot but in those times when we work also with roboticists and material scientists a lot and programmers we try to not have them be part of the team to solve problems we cannot solve but to bring their knowledge to condition the design process and the creative process and it changes everything. So again it's not about optimizing or making faster or making better it's about a new design paradigm in which that collective intelligence is used to produce projects. I think I'd probably add to the, Crayola says about this global network is that as a designer with that title or an architectural designer, it seems like I just recently moved to New York but no matter what city you're in if you're an architectural designer that your world of architectural designers quickly gets very small in a good way like you realize that everybody is sort of like minded and onto the same projects but that the collaboration is probably the best way to, one of the best ways to break out of that and find other directions. I think also it would be impossible to become a physicist and a programmer and a roboticist you just cannot possibly be that good at all of those things and yeah probably it would be different if on you know the Renaissance model is very beautiful and tempting to me it's very difficult to reproduce I think in these days. That's a kind of new kind of renaissance though in a way where again you still maybe are able to do many different things but by interacting with different people in different ways. I think being naive, being obsessed I said that being naive also it's another I think crucial thing because if I would know from the beginning the complexity, the nightmare of developing such projects then they would never begin even. So I think also this idea that you don't quite know what you're doing, something quite nice because in a way you don't quite get as scared you know and again you know this thing but I mean these robots are made to be used by engineers in certain kind of contexts not like punks into like an art festival you know like so there's ways in which then you find solutions but I think being a little bit naive also it's a good approach in a way. Every time we do an interactive project we say it's the last time. Because you know the things never want to work and then they work at the last minute and you don't know how but yeah the complexities are never something that you can really predict. It's nice to make it a little bit dirty because otherwise you only get this kind of painting of these sort of scenarios that kind of really make sense but I think behind this there's a lot of weird cathartic processes you know to be able to do this stuff that again I think is also an interesting topic to discuss you know how you end up spending so many years doing that thing or yeah because you didn't know that you would pay so many years to do it basically you know I think it's also. I showed in a lecture the project of the snake and then somebody because the snake in the play kills you know you really should and they ask me did the girl die so I won't know and then I thought well she could have maybe right and it strangled too hard. Like you're not cool you could have maybe that nasty snake. So yeah there is some reason involved. Maybe I can pull it back to modeling the sort of small scale for one for one more question from me. I think talking about sort of multimodal work that work especially clearly you work across media representation um your your work has themes and information that one can sort of deduce has been relied upon across them they're all very different but it's sort of a question that comes from the studio model here where we're constantly working but also wondering when to do anything um and it seems that days at a time can get lost to doing something that we don't remember. So one of the things that one of the ways that we kick ourselves out of that is usually with the insistence of the critic is to be compelled to make something or to model it or to draw something. So I guess um maybe I'll start again Cleyla your your process has a lot of analysis and a lot of research and a lot of sort of synthesizing and is there something that determines the whether it's going to be modeled or other sketches that are modeled in your process or there's not that many sketches actually in fact I can barely hold the pencil in my hand now this I think sketch sketches in terms of what you mean by by uh finished something in the end because I kind of feel that basically I'm just producing work but never finish anything so I I think it going back to this idea of a system in a way what I what I have I try to define the sort of boundaries of what I want to explore not exactly you know what I want to bring out of that but rather more the boundaries and the sort of rules of how I'm going to engage in such explorations so the artworks are essentially the results of these explorations that then are organized and eventually selected and then this becomes the artworks there's never the approach to make a sculpture or make a video it's more the idea of researching a given topic in a certain with a certain methodology and if you have enough coherency what comes out of this they can't be artworks even if they might be different things I mean you said you saw that there is there are big kind of digital paintings laser drawings of canvas some etching some sculptures some video projections but actually if you look through them there is a certain sense of coherency in the end because I think there is a sort of underlying system so the way I I guess approach this is to have quite clear the boundaries of what I want to do and then move quite freely within those boundaries because I tend to be quite frustrated when I have a very precise point of arrival in mind and I have to find a solution to get there what I'm very interested in almost working with technology as another collaborator developing a system that then can surprise me with the outputs so I'm very interested in this kind of exchange and you know when you start fixing exactly where you want to go then I don't know it's not an area that I'm very interested in it's very confusing can I just add the two things that we discuss internally in our group which one phrase that we use quite a bit is simply proof of concept like if there is an idea then there's a way in which we have to very quickly prove that concept we have to do in other words we have to start putting all these things together all of our work again I use the word multivariate again so many variables flying around simultaneously we don't isolate them it's not about optimizing it's about letting those things sing together so we have this this way of going through proof of concept stepping back one of the most revealing questions that you can ask any of us or any of you who have done a lot of making and sculpting and casting and prototyping is what is your most fantastical failure answering that question will allow you to step back and recount the story a narrative not only about how you found but about feedback it isolates this moment in time when you find that that doing brings agency and that's what's so crucial I can imagine no fantastical failures every project about you yeah I mean I had a lot of errors until like really very long ago so this kind of failures that they tend to be quite stressful as well don't try to be many of those yeah don't try to be perfect makers but I think also yeah what you said it's interesting because in a way also I mean from the video you show you realize the scale of in a way that the practice and obviously that kind of adds an incredible complexity into having both at the same time this kind of freedom to explore but at the same time I mean some sort of efficiency yeah in a way and and even if I actually don't ever practice at all I mean just me with this changing network but still in the annual phase sort of similar similar problems is how you know you want to be free but at the same time somehow efficient you know what I think efficiency it's also something that in a way kind of needs to be a little bit in the mix I think for me I think Josh you're interested in us also talk about how some of these issues translate to perhaps the environment of the studio or the making and I think one one thing that definitely comes from doing these projects and having these failures is to to not imagine that we have to pre-rationalize everything we want to make and then find the steps to get there but that's you know the making is you know you can it's basically thinking through doing so it's not about figuring out what you're going to build and then build it but start building with the few ideas that you have and then let those artifacts you know in a life of their own and inform back those original ideas that you hunt so at least that's how we always work I think failure as an open-ended question is a probably and actually a very good and optimistic way to end our panel so unless there are any questions from the audience that usually aren't but I'd like to thank everybody for coming today