Archinect - The Becoming Digital Blog

Unstable People Accessing Unstable Places

2017-11-08T15:36:06-05:00

We figured, if our video was being split up and sent around the world and then back again to a single screen, why not use something recognizable as our content?

So we used our faces.

We wanted to uses faces because they are immediately familiar--- the formation of where eyes + noses + mouths are pretty standard, and would be understandable to non-designers viewing this work. But just because it it is understandable, doesn’t mean it's not disturbing.

The website with the gif can be found here.

We split up our faces so they could be sent to the different AWS servers. We also added in some other objects representing some of the countries where we were using servers.That way, when the images come back, the make up partial faces, mashed-up faces, and mashed up new characters, like a koala with bangs or a sushi face.

For the final step, we sent the html website to people around the world, using Mechanical Turk. The workers who accepted those jobs were asked to outline the shape of the ...

Insight into Throbbers

2017-11-07T22:56:24-05:00

The workshop focused on throbbers-- those spinning circles that appear when you wait for a webpage or video to load.

Curtis has set up a system for us to visualize the physical distance of the infrastructure that makes up the internet. He did this by setting up access to 10+ servers across the world through AWS--Amazon Web Services. These servers communicate with other servers via fiber optic tubes that run under oceans, for example. This means that communicating with a server in Seoul will be slightly behind one located in Northern California. Usually this infinitesimal delay is imperceptible to an internet user, because we aren’t able to compare.

The assignment for the workshop was to design a throbber-- those spinny loading circles-- that had multiple parts or layers to the gif.

This way, we can send parts of the video to Columbus, and another part to Frankfurt, and still another to Sydney. Those servers all send the video back to the computer accessing the website. So the v...

Workshop, Take 2: Curtis Roth

2017-11-07T22:12:14-05:00

Our 2nd workshop just ended, this time, led by Curtis Roth.

Curtis Roth is a professor at OSU Knowlton School of Architecture and was out 2nd workshop leader. He has done 2 fellowships in the past 2 years--one at OSU in 2015 and one in Stuttgart, Germany in 2016. Both of those projects have to do with geography and labor practices of the internet.

Curtis opposes the idea that the “cloud” eliminates distance, or that space collapses because of our email, file sharing, and skyping abilities. There are actually very physical objects and systems that allow those things to work, like fiber optic tubes running across the ocean floor. He developed a project for us this weekend to visualize that geography of the internet.

Below I included a few images of his recent book “Some Dark Products.” In it, he investigates different instruments used by architects--like the detail drawing or specification sheet and performs experiments to show how they operate at a global scale and involve multiple ...

Part 3: Re-Piling

2017-10-09T08:56:44-04:00

In the final step of the assignment, Zeina and Jon wanted us to return these mesh into a new sort of pile.

Using our resulting meshes from the last portion, we put 3 flat cuts through the volume. This is one of the results--- totally departed from the original meshes.

SO, again this "brick"was given to the shared folder to be used as a stackable component in other groups' work. The idea was that these flat surfaces would make it possible to connect to the other bricks--even with overhangs + misalignments.

Finally as a group, together with a collection of strange bricks, we stacked, piled, and composed a "tower". The tower might be housing or some sort of public institutional building. It was pretty challenging to figure out how the bricks (designed by many others) could be resolved in the relationships to one another. The tower-- complete with sky bridges and tiny rocky balconies-- is here:

I should have done this at the beginning, but I need to credit my two group members Jackie Pot...

Part 2: MESH MASHING

2017-10-03T22:34:05-04:00

So the next day, Jon and Zeina informed us that those scans would be the source material for the next phase.

One unexpected part of the workshop was the democratic, or communal aspect of the tasks. Everything created was eventually shared in common folders, which could be downloaded, adjusted, distorted, uploaded again. Everyone has access to other groups meshes, and started off by re-imaging them through an online mesh sharing + rendering platform called "SKETCHFAB"

Next we picked our 3 favorite colleague meshes and set out to combine them into a newly created mesh, that had the DNA of those original paper models, but now were almost unrecognizable. This is what I came up with:

We decided it resembles a frog stuck in a wall.

^some (simulated) orthographic drawings of the very meshy form!

Getting Started!

2017-10-03T21:56:19-04:00

Hello! My name is Megan Mohney-- a thesis student and a member of the “BECOMING DIGITAL” seminar this semester.

We just finished our first workshop with MILLIONS. We met Jon May and Zeina Koreitem on Friday after they gave a talk to the school in our amazing new atrium space!

^ Instagram post from Outpost Office (who designed the furniture pieces!)

They introduced phase 1. We were divided in groups of 3 and each had to investigate a free 3d scanning app. MILLIONS has done expensive laser 3d scanning before, but had not tried these apps...

These apps don't make perfect meshes. Apps like Trino and Qlone typically are used for making distorted recreations of your friends' faces, or trying to capture trinkets and household items. Zeina repeatedly said "we are not going for accuracy we are not going for optimization"

First we made a gravity simulated tower in a digital software:

Then we modeled this physically.... and had to 3d scan the model. The result was a total distortion! (this is o...