Craft-Experiment

Purpose of the research is to propose a production system that expands the fuzziness range in digital fabrication methods while crossing the experience of developing new materials. The aim is to discuss the reproduction of non-standard, content-specific, geometrically complex architectural components with the internal forces of the material and its internal metamorphoses, by craft- analog computing methods. As De Landa argued in his essay Material and Complexity; “We may now be in a position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as something imposed from the outside on an inert matter, not as a hierarchical command from above as in an assembly line, but as something that may come from within the materials, a form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them to have their say in the structures we create.” (Manuel De Landa, 2002). Craft is used here as several experiments to expose both materials own behaviour and makers desire of making as conscious creators of space. Learning with experimental techniques in form making can easily activate designers curiosity learning from the failure not from the standard/fixed processes. Neri Oxman explains digital craft in her essay: “Craft, in general, represents such an affinity between the maker and its immediate context, the environment, which is to contain the object of desire. As such, beyond its traditional description or meaning, craftsmanship may be reinterpreted as a set of instructions combining knowledge and application, matter and tools. An operational framework for processing and re-organizing material constructs. Thus a craft of any kind may potentially serve as a guiding instruction-set, a formalism, which merges knowledge of application with an instrumentality of material organization.” (Oxman N., 2007) In this research relocation of magnetic fields will be examined to show how iron powders create in-between forces in containers surfaces, how they shape in different range of fullness and empiteness and how invisible field lines reorganized. Rather than finding the most optimized, most efficient concrete solution in form making, the form can also be something embodied in the crafty playing process.

Magnetic Experiment

The geometric occurrences-deformations in the magnetic field were observed by the controlled motion of the magnets in the different cross-sectional container schemes. The limits of freedom in the iron powders internal forces were deciphered by examining translocations of the magnets. New shapes and geometries were discovered by changing the container shapes, the direction, orientation, movement of the magnets and the amount of the powders (unit and particles). Iron powders reproduced their own self-organized forms with external variables (quantity-velocity-direction), just like “agents” in digital modelling. While these operations seem to be attracting a single point and force, experimental process makes it possible to see intermediate forces rather than it’s maximum, minimum and optimized forms. Intermediate forces are composed of the same particles, but their complex and dynamic behaviors are like frozen states at different time sections. This research contains several discoveries of experimental data that would allow the re-use of iron powders taken from machine shop by making magnetic field forces visible in different dimensions.

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“What matters from the philosophical point of view is preciesly that thoughness or rigidity are emergent properties of a metallic material that result from the complex dynamical behavior of some of its components. An even deeper philosophical insight is related to the fact that the Dynamics of populations of dislocations are very closely related to the population Dynamics of very different entities, such as molecules in a rhytmic chemical reaction, termite in a nest building colony, human agents in a market.” (De Landa, 2002)

References

De Landa, M. (2002). Material Complexity.
Oxman N. (2007). Digital Craft, Fabrication Based Design in the Age of Digital
Production.
Spuybroek L. (2005). The Structure of Vagueness, Textile The Journal of Cloth and
Culture.

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