Crystalpunk Refections
Last weekend I journeyed to sunny Utrecht in The Netherlands for a session of the ongoing Crystalpunk Workshop: three days of talk, presentations, hacking and thinking about all things Soft and Architectural organised by the capable and amiable Wilfried Hou Je Bek.
On Friday I got acquainted with C6, flight delays, horizontal sleet, lighting strikes, Dutch train delays and the work of Jelle Feringa from EZCT. EZCT's research is broad and deep, unfortunately the opportunities to link to it are not. Nevertheless, perseverance with their gorgeous (but confusing) flash interface rewards the patient reader with documentation of evolved chairs, wood-plastic hybrid materials, investigations in parametric design and rapid prototyping and more. I hope to one day continue the conversations we started about the role of genetic algorithms in moving the design process from hand to head, and from encapsulation of form to evaluation of function.
Saturday morning was spent exploring Utrecht with Orkan Telhan, wending our way through the best of Dutch design stores and the worst of Dutch shopping centres. Orkan and I independently chose to bring copies of Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles for workshop participants to browse, cementing its place along with the writing of Gordon Pask as a quintessential Crystalpunk text. We also both brought books by Danny Hillis (The Connection Machine and The Pattern on the Stone) - we can't both be wrong so this is proof positive that Hillis is a Crystalpunk like the rest of us.
The afternoon saw an introduction to Arch-OS from Chris Speed and Justin Roberts. Following some frantic hacking to get to know their data as best we could, my contribution to the Crystalpunk room is a Processing sketch which glues weather data from the University of Plymouth to a disused tower block in Utrecht. World changing stuff I'm sure you'll agree!
Saturday evening brought a whistlestop tour of Amsterdam courtesy of Leon and Toby C6 (thanks to them!) and a detour via Gouda and Den Haag (no thanks to Dutch train timetables and signage!).
On Sunday we started with an overview of work by Franziska Hübler (with Jeremy Tai Abbett) of Truth Dare Double Dare. Lots of tangible interaction and wearable goodness, and a sneak preview of some sublime Processing-powered drawings of hair and dust. Next up, I presented a selection of projects old and new: pedestrian simulation for airports, bottom-up collaborative mapping visualisation from OpenStreetMap, robotics simulation from Leeds and hopefully enough theoretical glue to tie it all together. C6 followed with a presentation of recent DiY and self-funded subversive/intervention pieces, and a preview of some new software for distilling the relationships between online chat participants using genetic representations of compatibility, echo.
Later, Christina Ray presented a selection of work from Glowlab, usefully tying together several projects that have piqued my interest over the last year including One Block Radius and Foundcity. Orkan Telhan presented his social maps of time and space and gave us an overview of his use of gathering context from concept maps. Finally, Tomasz Jaskiewicz and Dieter Vandoren from Protospace in Delft provided a rich overview of soft and hard architecture in the form of swarm optimisation for planning and design and their work in reactive spaces and structures (muscle tower 1 reminded me of The Senster, a Philips sponsored cybernetic installation from the seventies, and my Dutch cyberhacker Crystalpunk loop was complete).
My thanks to Wilfried Hou Je Bek for hosting, to C6 as tour guides, and to all the participants for making it worth the trip.
On Friday I got acquainted with C6, flight delays, horizontal sleet, lighting strikes, Dutch train delays and the work of Jelle Feringa from EZCT. EZCT's research is broad and deep, unfortunately the opportunities to link to it are not. Nevertheless, perseverance with their gorgeous (but confusing) flash interface rewards the patient reader with documentation of evolved chairs, wood-plastic hybrid materials, investigations in parametric design and rapid prototyping and more. I hope to one day continue the conversations we started about the role of genetic algorithms in moving the design process from hand to head, and from encapsulation of form to evaluation of function.
Saturday morning was spent exploring Utrecht with Orkan Telhan, wending our way through the best of Dutch design stores and the worst of Dutch shopping centres. Orkan and I independently chose to bring copies of Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles for workshop participants to browse, cementing its place along with the writing of Gordon Pask as a quintessential Crystalpunk text. We also both brought books by Danny Hillis (The Connection Machine and The Pattern on the Stone) - we can't both be wrong so this is proof positive that Hillis is a Crystalpunk like the rest of us.
The afternoon saw an introduction to Arch-OS from Chris Speed and Justin Roberts. Following some frantic hacking to get to know their data as best we could, my contribution to the Crystalpunk room is a Processing sketch which glues weather data from the University of Plymouth to a disused tower block in Utrecht. World changing stuff I'm sure you'll agree!
Saturday evening brought a whistlestop tour of Amsterdam courtesy of Leon and Toby C6 (thanks to them!) and a detour via Gouda and Den Haag (no thanks to Dutch train timetables and signage!).
On Sunday we started with an overview of work by Franziska Hübler (with Jeremy Tai Abbett) of Truth Dare Double Dare. Lots of tangible interaction and wearable goodness, and a sneak preview of some sublime Processing-powered drawings of hair and dust. Next up, I presented a selection of projects old and new: pedestrian simulation for airports, bottom-up collaborative mapping visualisation from OpenStreetMap, robotics simulation from Leeds and hopefully enough theoretical glue to tie it all together. C6 followed with a presentation of recent DiY and self-funded subversive/intervention pieces, and a preview of some new software for distilling the relationships between online chat participants using genetic representations of compatibility, echo.
Later, Christina Ray presented a selection of work from Glowlab, usefully tying together several projects that have piqued my interest over the last year including One Block Radius and Foundcity. Orkan Telhan presented his social maps of time and space and gave us an overview of his use of gathering context from concept maps. Finally, Tomasz Jaskiewicz and Dieter Vandoren from Protospace in Delft provided a rich overview of soft and hard architecture in the form of swarm optimisation for planning and design and their work in reactive spaces and structures (muscle tower 1 reminded me of The Senster, a Philips sponsored cybernetic installation from the seventies, and my Dutch cyberhacker Crystalpunk loop was complete).
My thanks to Wilfried Hou Je Bek for hosting, to C6 as tour guides, and to all the participants for making it worth the trip.
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