Demiurge just received the processed material for fabrication of Volkan Alkanoglu’s sculpture for the Convention Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This is an exciting project for us as Volkan represents an emerging breed of public artist who apply rigorous design processes, material research, and contextual specificity in an effort to create public art that is as much about emergent visual phenomena as it is traditional aesthetic qualities. There is a new paradigm in public art; the synthesis of a wide range of disciplines, from color theory to metallurgy, and the mastery of algorithmic modelling programs has allowed public art to transcend traditional typologies to become less figurative and more abstract in a way that speaks directly to the new processes and tools used in design and fabrication.

Aluminum sheet was waterjet and indexed, and sent for brake forming, or bending, to create the radiating planar shapes of the finished piece.

During fabrication design, I added small index marks using GH so that the beak of the brake could be easily located during forming.

And used Grasshopper and Excel to generate a color-coded index of each unique piece showing the precise brake angle.

As well as using GH to label the drawing and the Waterjet cutting file.

Each of the steps in our fabrication process is carefully designed to take advantage of the capabilities of our tools and to maximize the efficiency of cutting and forming processes. The design of processes and tooling is not glamorous, but if done correctly it can subtly reinforce larger thematic or aesthetic elements in the project, and become part of the design.

The integration of Grasshopper and other script into production processes is potentially more beneficial than using GH on the design and form-generation side, and I look forward to developing more and increasingly versatile definitions to solve unique production problems as I was able to do here.

More as fabrication continues.