080406_APERIODIC VERTEBRAE v2.0.2

Finally back from several events and wanderings all over the place (Paris, New York, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Barcelona,...) - here is a first update on the prototype THEVERYMANY produced for Node08 / Frankfurt.

Its assembly has this time been a success (and hughe improvement since v1.0) as it took less than 24 hours & 2 people & 2 laptops to (re-)assemble the 360 panels and 320 nodes...

Once more demonstrating us "one better spend its time within development embedding assembly logic rather than waiting the material world to solve the fuzzines..."

(I will update the "information modeling" improvements on the previous post more focused on the digital back bone approach of the piece...)




"Aperiodic Vertebrae v2.0"
THEVERYMANY (project team: Marc Fornes / Skylar Tibbits)
NODE08 (www.node08.vvvv.org)
April 5th - 12th, Frankfurt / Germany

Many thanks to Eno Henze (http://www.enohenze.de/) & the entire VVVV team (http://vvvv.org) for their invitation & sponsorship

Also many more thanks to our sponsors for the piece:

- Quadrant EPP USA, Inc. (www.quadrantepp.com) > provided us sheets of polyethylene (3/16″ thick)

- Continental Signs (www.continentalsigns.net) and Jared Laucks > CNC cut of the panels

- Dick Dunlop > laser cut of the 320 unique connections (3/16″ acryclic)

080406_APERIODIC VERTEBRAE v2.0

"Aperiodic Vertebrae v2.0"
THEVERYMANY
(project team: Marc Fornes / Skylar Tibbits)
NODE08 (www.node08.vvvv.org)
April 5th - 12th, Frankfurt / Germany

Many thanks to Eno Henze (http://www.enohenze.de/) & the entire VVVV team (http://vvvv.org/) for their invitation & sponsorship


TEMPLATES FOR FABRICATION:
Like the form finding, all the panels, connections pieces and "helpers" coded strings engraved have all been 100% the result of a performative explicit protocol entirely coded in vb...
That part - even though presented down the row as a formal exercice / sculpture - has always been though from scratch as performative test / prototypical methodologie/process to convince further consulting work...








Here are the templates for CNC milling of the panels; 12 unique shapes only are much easier to nest (simple arrays) than all custom pieces...
Many thanks to Quadrant EPP USA, Inc. (http://www.quadrantepp.com/) for providing the 7 sheets of polyethylene required (3/16″ thick)
Many thanks to Continental Signs (http://www.continentalsigns.net/) and Jared Laucks for the CNC cut of those panels






Here are 5 (out of 7) templates for the connections to be laser cut on acrylic sheets (3/16″ thick) - total of 320 unique pieces
Many thanks to Dick Dunlop for the access to the laser cutter (3/16″ acryclic)

080131_Exhibition: Aperiodic_Vertebrae (day4)

"Generator.x 2.0: beyond the screen..." an exhibition curated by Marius Watz at the DAM(Berlin) with works by Jared Tarbell (US), Commonwealth (US), Theverymany (FR/US), Leander Herzog (CH), Marius Watz (NO) and participants of the Generator.x 2.0 Workshop...

THEVERYMANY (Marc Fornes, Skylar Tibbits) / Aperiodic_Vertebrae
LOG_assembly_day_04: things are going smoother - one day to go before the opening...

080130_Exhibition: Aperiodic_Vertebrae

THEVERYMANY has been set up based on a continuum research on explicit and encoded protocols within design - the first implicit consequence of its core is to let traces; those traces - often under the format of simple text files - allow to exactly reproduce or alter the model, eventually share axioms... but it somehow also requires to admit and assume those traces, if so, one can learn from mistakes, errors and/or tolerances of previous stages or generation based on feed back...



Yesterday was the kick start in Berlin of the assembly process for the installation -once again the amount of components generated through a long chaine of various small codes / utilities has directly revealled "dirt"/issues hidden behind a fast/furious seamless process... yet nothing extraordinary beyond the purpose of a physical mock up: large scale test for a complete automate pipe line of form & drawing generation...






DIRTY DIGITAL:
One of the significant issue we came across is related to the nature of tiling and computation - the subdivision algorythm is based on a recursive protocol (or SUBSTITUTION) which is first drawing a primitve pyramide (within a choice of four primitives) which then gets subdivide - the process is repeated many times within itself to generate self-similarity... the issue there is that within each generation the protocol requires to "compare" (points, lenght, areas, etc...) and that matching process needs to determine whether two geometry or parameters are "equal" given an inevitable rounding errors... unfortunately the rounding errors are bound to accumulate whithin each generation...

Yet it wasn't any special issue except when point connection gets generated and therefore requires to increase the tolerance factor not to miss any neighbors... though applying overal tolerance is triggering other error trapping while small naming or matching utilities code are running as host on the larger protocol...

Anyway - suming up it is yet still triggering slight erros and confusion - though I'd like to be transparent and learn within those error trapping - it is defintively part of a certain material paradigm debugging...


Let see which surprises are we getting tomorrow...
"a chaque jour sa peine..."

080124_Exhibition: Aperiodic_Vertebrae

THEVERYMANY (Marc Fornes, Skylar Tibbits) has been kindly invited to exhibit a physical piece at "Generator.X v2.0: Beyond the screen" - a workshop and exhibition about digital fabrication and generative systems curated by Marius Watz (http://www.generatorx.no/) in collaboration with Club Transmediale and [DAM] Berlin.


Based onto earlier experimentation (Aperiodic series) the installation is an assembly of nearly 500 flat panels (11 types) all milled within 6 sheets (8 feet by 4 feet) of corrugated plastic (4 colors: black, silver grey, white and translucent) and also nearly 500 assembly details (moreless all unique!) all laser cut onto 7 sheets of transparent acrylic...
Despite mesuring 13 feet long (after been scaled nearly by half for simple reason of space available within the gallery!) all the panels and assembly details are now flying over nested within one suitcase only...
(pictures of the assembly process should come up soon)



It has been quite some intense moments of scripting since last weekend - mainly sequences of utilities codes - in order to perform a complete automaton starting from the first 4 nurbs curve (those ones were drafted!), the generation of the geometries till the production of each components, notches, unroll, color coding, naming, etc... but there were also a lot of discussion on logic, sequence and protocols to be set up in order to PRE-facilitate as much as we can the entire physical re-fold-assembly of nearly a thousand parts...
Illustrated above (top) the layout of one of the acrylic sheet (number 6) with 66 assembly details - all got named with the number of the piece (as text + name of the object) + each notche with the color of the brick it should connect to and the name of its panel it should locked in...
Illustrated above (bottom) the lay out of one of the 11 types of panels onto a sheets of corrugated plastic - the intersting figure is that the nesting of the panels sheets has been the only hand protocols as a simple traight forward array of the same geometry - this is where it is a hughe gain of time and energy as nesting for so many parts if different would take ages (if even only possible) to find an efficient nested solution...
That starting hypothesis of embeded relative simplicity due to the self-similarity (without even counting the labor time saved to look for the right panels when assembling - imagine a pile of 500 panels to pick from?!!) is RE-questioning the complete mass customization fashion and other kit of parts...
Though the amount of components generated which have to be RE-assembled is also RE-questioning the limit of using generative processes without going further down the line using assembly robots...


Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen
24 Jan -­ 2 Feb 2008, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse / [DAM] Berlin

Credits:
Design: THEVERYMANY (Marc Fornes + Skylar Tibbits)
Scripting: Marc Fornes
Manufacturing protocols: Marc Fornes + Skylar Tibbits
Laser cutting: Skylar Tibbits
CNC & material research: Jared Laucks
Assembling: Skylar Tibbits (+ helpers!)

ANYONE IN BERLIN INTERESTED TO HELP ASSEMBLING IS HIGHLY WELCOME!!
PLEASE COME OVER AT THE [DAM] GALLERY
(starting on the Jan 29th till February 2nd)