Impression de Roche
Le monde est « sur le point d’être révolutionné » par l’impression 3D depuis des années maintenant, mais à part le prototypage rapide, les selfies 3D et la maison imprimée en 3D occasionnelle, nous n’en voyons pas grand-chose tous les jours. Alors pourquoi cette technologie n’a-t-elle pas révolutionné les infrastructures modernes ? L’une des raisons est qu’il doit encore concurrencer le béton, l’un des matériaux les moins chers, les plus polyvalents et les plus efficaces de l’histoire de l’architecture. Lors de la Biennale d’architecture de Chicago, le Self-Assembly Lab du MIT et Gramazio Kohler Research de l’ETH Zurich ont présenté un processus qui pourrait enfin assembler le béton, en utilisant uniquement une extrudeuse d’impression 3D, des roches, des cordes et une conception intelligente.

Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

The Self-Assembly Line
Can we create objects that assemble themselves — that zip together like a strand of DNA or that have the ability for transformation embedded into them? These are the questions that Skylar Tibbits investigates in his Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a cross-disciplinary research space where designers, scientists and engineers come together to find ways for disordered parts to become ordered structures.

Posenenske applied primary coloured sticky strips to paper, creasing them and then applying them in layers until shapes were built up – as in CMP 65 (1965) for example. She progressed to using sheet metal sprayed with monochrome paint which she then folded into sculptural shapes, and combined this with corrugated cardboard to produce the series ‘Vierkantrohre’ (Square Tubes, 1967) which look like ventilation shafts. She conceived these early sculptures as modules that could be adapted according to available space, each one assembled into a shape ultimately appropriate to the context it found itself in.

The screw

Egle Rakauskaite is a leading Lithuanian artist, prominent on the world scene for her highly individual and memorable works. Born in 1967, she studied painting at Vilnius Academy of Arts and graduated in 1993. Described by critic Lolita Jablonskiene as “a unique artist, who does not follow any current trends of Lithuanian art”, Rakauskaite works in various media (video, performance, photography, making objects), free to associate and assemble them in different configurations as the project demands.In the early years of her career, she made objects out of unconventional and perishable materials such as chocolate, jasmine flowers, human hair, honey and fat. As she states, “these materials were used to protest against paint and canvas. Many critics attributed this interest in unconventional materials and also some of the images I constructed to my interest in feminist art. However, I think that at present the differences between male and female creation are not that visible any more. It is important that the art work opens itself to the consciousness and sub-consciousness of the viewer”.

Morphs
MORPHs, short for Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra, are motive architectural structures which can crawl and self-assemble in order to encourage social interaction through play. These playful robotic creatures encourage the public to choreograph them into dance routines, assemble them into complex sculptural geometries or else play music at them, which they will play back over time. Groups of people can interact at any one time and eventually develop a dialogue amongst participants, through the use of contemporary digital technology.