Rasper
Rasping Music is an audiovisual installation in appreciation of the ignored aural/visual phenomena surrounding our daily lives. It involves new mechatronic instruments that employ some everyday objects of the urban life, shifting the medium in which they normally exist, and formalizing them through patterns of a rhythmic grid. In these instruments, DC motors and actuators are detached from the realm in which they are tools to help run our machines––where their noise is merely the aural artifact of the urban technology––, and turned into amedium for sound/music. In contrast to their everyday location, i.e., hidden inside black boxes of our machines, their bodily existence is fully exposed, flaunting the physicality of their noise. This physicality is further highlighted in arrays of white light, which––unlike the florescent lights of our offices––are not there to help us see things, but to be seen themselves.

Phantom Geometry
“We are developing a system of moving streaming information through space, in the form of light, to generate material form. This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. Light is the medium for data in our system. There resident data can be drawn through physical space, at full scale, to generate a photographic artifact, or to instantiate material form through the selective polymerization of proximal photo-responsive resin. This thesis, then, begins to investigate a design paradigm centered on the material reification of light. That paradigm questions the supremacy of the digital model, and the static flattening and stacking logics inherent to typical fabrication workflows. It is part of a conversation about representation, about the role of the designer, and about the way we make.”

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón