The Megastructure Compendium
Science & Futurism
In the future humanity may build enormous structures, feats of mega-engineering that may rival planets or even be of greater scope. This episode catalogs roughly 100 major types of Megastructure, from those that are cities in space to those that rival galaxies.
O’Neill cylinder
O’Neill was inspired by the papers written by his students. He began to work out the details of a program to build self-supporting space habitats in free space.Among the details was how to provide the inhabitants of a space colony with an Earth-like environment. His students had designed giant pressurized structures, spun up to approximate Earth gravity by centrifugal force . With the population of the colony living on the inner surface of a sphere or cylinder, these structures resembled “inside-out planets”. He found that pairing counter-rotating cylinders would eliminate the need to spin them using rockets.This configuration has since been known as the O’Neill cylinder.
Disrupted Domains
Disrupted Domains features new animations created with molecular visualization software and SARS-CoV-2 structures displayed in Quorum at the Science Center. The animations were developed in remote collaboration with uCity Square biotech company Integral Molecular for Splan’s Science Center Bioart Residency while “sheltering in place” for COVID-19. The work in the exhibition is part of Precarious Structures, Splan’s project that explores the interconnectedness of cultural and biological systems during the coronavirus pandemic. Accompanying soundscape by Frank Masciocchi recorded in collaboration with Splan over Zoom.
VIDEO
Machine Memoirs
Es una exploración de estructuras celestes a través de la mente de una máquina. Esta instalación inmersiva tiene como objetivo combinar exploraciones pasadas y soñar con lo que puede existir más allá de nuestro alcance. Usando inteligencia artificial para narrar lo “desconocido” y una red neuronal generativa entrenada en imágenes de la Tierra, la Luna, Marte y la Galaxia, tomadas de observaciones de la ISS, Chandra, Kepler, Voyager y Hubble, esta instalación imagina un universo alternativo, quizás aportando más textura a nuestra propia tela.
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Is an exploration of celestial structures through the mind of a machine. This immersive installation aims to combine past explorations and dream of what may exist just beyond our reach. Using machine intelligence to narrate the “unknown,” and a generative neural network trained on images of the Earth, Moon, Mars and the Galaxy, taken from ISS, Chandra, Kepler, Voyager, and Hubble observations, this installation imagines an alternate universe, perhaps providing further texture to the fabric of our own.
Akemi Takeya
Granular Synthesis
“From a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain.”
Inverso Mundus
The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian “reverse, the opposite” and the Old Italian “poetry,” and Mundus – the Latin “world,” hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.
Ikarus
Des éléments qui semblent essentiels à la pratique de De Boer sont présentés aux algorithmes, aux fonctions de lecture aléatoire, aux randomiseurs ou à d’autres structures codées. En soumettant son propre matériel à ces facteurs décisifs, l’œuvre est réarrangée en permanence selon ces chemins algorithmiques en constante évolution.
Spacestream
The project uses generative computational strategies to generate series of special stream paths within 3D space frame, giving it structural stiffness and aesthetic values. The generative algorithm is based on use of multi-agent systems, shortest path calculation, lattice stigmergy and structural analysis. The goal is to create continuously thickened bundle paths within the fuzzy 3D space frame structure, where the bundles double as camouflage and reinforcement for the joints/seams between the welded components, allowing for fabrication of large scale structures, mediating between the discreet components and continuous system.Space Stream is a student project which aims to explore influence of rule-based design systems on low-tech fabrication technique of welding. The research concentrates on wireframe structures, which are strengthened through subdivision of basic geometrical units and bundling and reinforcing of the main structural strands. The custom software used for this project is centered on Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm in combination with agent-based modeling techniques.
布列茲石
Пьер Булез
Structures I & II
HOMAGE
Ohne ihn wäre die Geschichte der Musik seit 1945 eine andere: Pierre Boulez – Ikone der Neuen Musik, dessen Vehemenz eine der tiefsten ideologischen Spaltungen in der Musik bewirkte. Mit brillanter Polemik forderte er etwa die Sprengung aller Opernhäuser. Seine Kunst des Komponierens machte ihn so einzigartig wie seine Art zu dirigieren.In den 1950er Jahren etablierte sich Boulez definitiv als einer der Komponisten seiner Zeit. Beeinflusst von der Wiener Schule entwickelten die Franzosen Techniken und Kompositionsmethoden, die zum großen Teil auf mathematischen Prinzipien beruhten. 1951 komponierte er Polyphonie X für 18 Instrumente und Structures I für zwei Klaviere, serialistische Stücke schlechthin. Boulez war einer der Schöpfer des integralen Serialismus, ein Konzept, das sich aus Schönbergs Dodekaphonismus ableitet.
mandelbrot set (zooming in)
The Mandelbrot set shows more intricate detail the closer one looks or magnifies the image, usually called “zooming in”. The following example of an image sequence zooming to a selected c value gives an impression of the infinite richness of different geometrical structures and explains some of their typical rules. The magnification of the last image relative to the first one is about 1010 to 1. Relating to an ordinary monitor, it represents a section of a Mandelbrot set with a diameter of 4 million kilometers. Its border would show an astronomical number of different fractal structures.
СЕРИС ВИН ЭВАНС
ケリス·ウィン·エヴァンス
Form in Space…By Light
‘Cerith’s installation sits beautifully within the space, unfolding as you walk through,’ explains Clarrie Wallis, Tate’s Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art. The neon experience builds, from a single ‘peep hole’ ring in the South Duveens, through which you can glimpse swirls of radial light and an imposing octagon in the central gallery. The fractured neon fragments look like frantically drawn sparkler-lines on fireworks night.But there’s method and logic within these celestial scribbles. Hidden in the design are references to a host of highbrow sources, from Japanese ‘Noh’ theatre, to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. Don’t worry if you missed them. The beauty of rendering precise (verging on obscure) references in such a celebratory neon explosion allows for multiple – if not endless – interpretations.Each way you look at the sprawling 2km of neon tubing, a different shape or symbol emerges. No small thanks to the elegant way in which the structures have been painstakingly suspended. ‘There were over 1000 fixing points, and obviously we couldn’t drill 1000 holes in the Grade II listed building,’ Wallis explains. ‘We had to work with structural engineers very intensely, so as to be completely happy and convinced that we would be able to remove it without damaging the fabric of the building.’Though it seems too soon to be discussing the installation’s removal, Wallis has a point. It’s a visibly fragile, delicate sculpture – whose impermanence makes it more intriguing. As it is a site-specific sculpture, it can’t be recreated elsewhere. What’s more, because the neon tubes are filled with a constantly moving stream of pulsing, vibrating gasses, visitors will never see the same sculpture twice.
Dina Khuseyn, Patrick K.-H., Oleg Makarov
A multivarious result of visual representation of 3 non-identical structures (dance performance, sound art and animation) points at interactivity as the main possible axis of reference. Necessity of this axis derives from specific interpretations that can only appear by juxtaposing of several systems. It opposes to traditional “parallelism” of media, employed in theater that only imitates causality, but having it already done before performance is starting.
In Cinestetika, each element of each media works as separate PROCESS, but also serves a SIGNAL to other medias. This essential core makes Cinestetika rather an instrument to make a term “live performance” filled with its perfect sense.