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."