Another Iteration

Removing the most obvious boundary of the canal.

Creating Landscape for Program

These land formations were designed to create a variety of landscape interactions to accomodate the variety in types of interactions that occur across programs. Such interactions occur between mounds, valleys, a lake, flat land, streams, delta, a canal and the river. Program has been grouped according to interaction types which are linked to landscape interaction types.

Looping Around Boundary Conditions

These diagrams are based on three-dimensional curves that were established from programmatic organizations, that are then used as boundary conditions for a looping algorithm. Each set of boundary curves represents the programmatic information from the perspective of a retreatant that is focused on advancing either the mind, body or spirit.

Comments from Gisela

Erica: The program diagrams for mind, body spirit that you generated so far are superbly developed and executed. You are very precise in this work and create beautiful expressions. Yet I think at this point they are not specific enough to be generative. They remain in the gestural realm... I understood that you explore possibilities of creating surfaces through varying loopings, and specifically how these surfaces change depending on the kind of loops; and alternatively the kind of global outline you loop them around. You could generate this productive specificity by associating your index of activities as input relative to the different kind-of-loopings plus kind-of-global-outline you associate them with.That same logic could also be employed for the spatial expressions you generated in your crochet models, in order to start with a concrete assembly logic.

Playing with Paper Loops to Help Create an Organizational Plan

Crocheted Fence, Artist Unknown

I'm not sure who the artist is, but I appreciate the hybrid language of the traditional fence linking with crochet patterning. Only a few different "stitches" are used, but the variation in scale and of elements within each stitch (e.g. length of a certain side of the stitch) creates a beautiful patterning of unique stitch combinations. It is interesting to look at the relationships within the pattern, at the local level of each stitch, up to the level of a sub-pattern, up to the level of the entire pattern.

Sean B. Carroll, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful"

"All organizers share the property of influencing the formation of pattern, or morphogenesis, in tissues or cells. The basic interpretation of their special activity is that the cells of organizers produce substances that can influence the development of other cells. Such substances have been dubbed morphogens. The effects of organizers depend upon their distance from target cells...The idea then is that cells surrounding the source respond according to the amount of morphogen they experience...The morphogens responsible for the activity of organizers were some of the most sought "Holy Grails" of embryology The major difficulty that retarded further advances was that the organizer activity was a property of collections of cells. Any cell makes thousands of substances and it was always possible that more than one substance was responsible for organizer activity....They would wait decades."

J. Scott Turner, "The Tinkerer's Accomplice"

"Does intentionality require memory? Let us say that the answer is yes. Does it is then follow that the only kind of memory that counts is embodied in webs of information flow between nerve cells striving to control one another through chemical synapses? Could not highly structured and persistent webs of matter and energy flows through a soil ecosystem also qualify as a form of memory?

Does intentionality involve cognition? Again let us stipulate that it does. Minds can come in many forms, though, and it does not follow that intentionality can arise only in mnids like ours. For that matter, need minds require brains at all? If our cognition arises from maps of the "real world" being built by agents of homeostasis that have no awareness of the minds they are producing, could not something similar arise among, say, a crowd of mound-building termites, with their mounds mapping environments just as our brains do?"

This idea is just amazing to me, and supports the application of abstracted systems in biology (such as how the mind works) to other systems (even if they are also in biology). It is also amazing to see such relience of the termites on their specific environments and to imagine that this relationship is even more interactive than it seems. The explanation (which I did not include here) of how these termites design their mounds and how specific the environment must be is fascinating. But it is even more fascinating to think about how that specific environment controls the mound design without the termites even "knowing."

Diagram of a Crochet Pattern

As part of a Visual Studies assignment.

Scripting Boundary Negotiations

The following is a script written for a group Visual Studies project done with Lauren MacCuaig, Leslie Billhymer and Dan Affleck. The main objective for us was to be able to negotiate within, and actually rely on, boundary conditions.





















Main

Sub Main
Dim arrCurveSetIDs, arrCurvePts1, arrCurvePts2
Dim i, counter, arrAllPoints(), backCounter

arrCurveSetIDs = Rhino.GetObjects("Select Curves", 4)
If IsNull(arrCurveSetIDs) Then Exit Sub
arrCurvePts1 = Rhino.DivideCurve(arrCurveSetIDs(0),300)
arrCurvePts2 = Rhino.DivideCurve(arrCurveSetIDs(1),300)

backCounter = UBound(arrCurvePts1)
counter = 0
For i = 0 To UBound(arrCurvePts1)
If counter Mod 4 = 0 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts1(backCounter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 1 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts1(counter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 2 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts2(counter)
Else If counter Mod 4 = 3 Then
ReDim Preserve arrAllPoints(i)
arrAllPoints(i) = arrCurvePts2(backCounter)
End If
End If
End If
End If
counter = counter+1
backCounter = backCounter - 1
Next

Rhino.AddInterpCurve arrAllPoints

End Sub

Initial Diagramming of Program Relationships

This diagram is one of a few initial mappings of programmatic usage throughout a day at the retreat center. Shown here is the relationship between two scenarios: one of a person focused on having a physical experience while at the center, the other focused on a spiritual experience.

from "Emergence," Steven Johnson

"In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them."

Exactly the relationships that I am studying in cell biology - the way smooth muscle cellular edge behaviors rely on the status of their extracellular matrix. Similar to slime mold cells forming a community, I consider parts of the cellular edge acting independently at some instances, and together at others. The variety seems to be based on both external and internal signals and communications. (i.e. if another cell is sensed, if the cell itself is highly tensioned along one axis, etc.)

Continuity within Form_Work of Ruth Asawa

Continuity not only in movement of the forms, but of their construction via a continuous wire (or line).

Study on Monastery and Retreat Center Schedules_with Lauren MacCuaig

J. Scott Turner, "The Tinkerer's Accomplice"

"The essential difference between cognition and intentionality. Both involve conformity between the "real" world and mental representations of that world. Cognition involves building a mental world that conforms to the real world outside. Changes in the real world impose similar changes on the mental worlds that represent it. Intentionality arises when a discrepancy between the real world and the mental world is resolved by work being done to make the real world correspond to the mental world."
Inspiration towards the idea of intentional initatiations of change within complex systems, lying interstitially between two subsystems. The actual means of connection between subsystems and between heirarchies of systems is what interests me.

Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"

"I suggest then that a healthy ecology of human civilization would be defined somewhat as follows: A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics."

Sanford Kwinter from "Who's Afraid of Formalism?"

"Formalism demonstrates first and foremost that form is resonance and expression of embedded forces. The best local formalisms show that these embedded forces are themselves organised and have a preconcrete, logical form of their own. The dynamic relation between these two levels of form is the space where all indeterminacy or historical becoming unfolds. Extended or true formalisms are diferent only that they also describe relations of resonance and expression between local forms or form systems...The great formalists have always been able to peer into the object toward its rules of formation and see these two strata together as a mobile, open and oscillating system subject to a greater or lesser number of external pressures. The manifest form - that which appears - is the result of a computational interaction between internal rules and external (morphogenetic) pressures that temseleves, originate in other adjacent forms...Algorithmic formalism (the most dynamic, extendable kind) was an invention of Goethe's and remains the basis of all robust, generative formalisms (including those being used today in computational biology)."