From my very first steps with pro­cess­ing I’ve always been fas­ci­nated by the divi­sion of space, vol­umes and sur­faces. In ret­ro­spect, many con­structs can be seen as explo­rations of this theme. To my delight, a lot of the con­cepts I dab­bled with in igno­rance are actively explored in the field of algo­rith­mic archi­tec­ture, or to use a term coined by Kostas Terzidis, algo­tec­ture. On a whim, I bought a pam­flet by Ben­jamin Aranda & Chris Lasch, Tool­ing. It was like lift­ing a peb­ble and find­ing a mountain.

I had this feel­ing only once before. When we moved to another house at age 10, I dis­cov­ered an aban­doned chem­istry set in the garage. I hap­pily wasted hours with the strange mate­ri­als inside and as a high­light cre­ated a pur­ple froth­ing expanse of foam stain­ing the skin a sickly brown for days after. Sur­pris­ingly many ran­dom com­bi­na­tions resulted in mal­odor­ous vapors of amaz­ing vari­ety to delight fam­ily and neigh­bors. For­tu­nately I ran out of chem­i­cals before I ran out of ideas. With their usual unyield­ing com­mon sense my par­ents declined to restock the var­i­ous vials and pow­ders. My chem­i­cal days over, I resumed my favorite passtime, sit­ting in the mid­dle of a big pile of Lego mak­ing ping-ping noises.(Much like a mete­orite cool­ing in its impact crater after a super­heated entry).

Any­way, yes, Pro­cess­ing, exactly… Years after my short stint in chem­i­cal horse­play, I was aston­ished to dis­cover that chem­istry was not merely a toy, it was a sci­ence, an indus­try, a pos­si­ble life­time devo­tion. It is a path I never fol­lowed, I went into physics instead.

Pro­cess­ing is my sec­ond chem­istry set. With its low thresh­old it helps me imag­ine math­e­mat­i­cal and geo­met­ri­cal what­ifs. What if I take a cube and cut it up in smaller cubes, and do it again and again? What if I repeat­edly divide a sur­face? What if… We play end­lessly on the crowded beach of com­plex­ity, self-similarity and other fash­ion­able con­cepts. The sand­cas­tles we build are but tiny, pale reflec­tions of the glass, con­crete and steel mastodonts on the horizon.

I have fun build­ing my sand­cas­tles but real­ize all too well it’s just play. Com­plex­ity is easy and inter­est­ing but rarely usable. And nowhere is this more evi­dent than in mod­ern, parametric/algorithmic archi­tec­ture. A design con­cept is one thing, get­ting a viable build­ing out of it is evi­dently some­thing else alto­gether. Some­what iron­i­cally I feel, this is referred to as the prob­lem of sim­plex­ity, in this con­text the reduc­tion of an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing form to a struc­tural model. E.g. the ran­dom sub­di­vi­sion of cubes as explored in the early D5LV results in a self-similar swarm-like col­lec­tion of boxes. How­ever, these boxes often inter­sect, float freely, have no eas­ily extractable rela­tion to each other. Trans­lat­ing this into some­thing real, like try­ing to get a STL out of it, would require exten­sive work, far more than the orig­i­nal piece. Com­plex­ity attracts all the atten­tion, with spec­tac­u­lar imagery, huge promises and boast­ful lines. In the back­ground sim­plex­ity qui­etly toils away, its achieve­ments wrongly attrib­uted to its loud brother.

In a way, there’s a dan­ger inher­ent to Pro­cess­ing and the gen­er­a­tive con­cepts it so read­ily allows access to: we might come to believe that it’s easy. Judg­ing from ques­tions I get, many already believe this. From absurdly com­plex projects to hun­dred­fold increases in scale, the easy ques­tions are often impos­si­ble to answer. (The hard ques­tions are often quite easy.) I see sim­i­lar­i­ties with the pro­fil­er­a­tion of CGI indus­trial design mod­els on the inter­net. Whole blogs thrive on pretty images of impos­si­ble to real­ize but beau­ti­ful con­cepts, reduc­ing design to illustration.

Any­way, enough with the ram­blings, I’ve got two small con­structs, some­what related to this post. My cur­rent fas­ci­na­tion with the more prac­ti­cal side of gen­er­a­tive algo­rithms leads me to rethink much of my past con­structs. The afore­men­tioned cube sub­di­vi­sion is fun but lacks a clear rela­tion­ship between its ele­ments, beyond the obvi­ous self-similarity. Using my mesh code-in-progress, I sought an iter­a­tive sub­di­vi­sion algo­rithm that wouldn’t suf­fer from this kind of dis­so­cia­tive behav­ior. The end result should be inter­est­ingly com­plex but still be a sin­gle con­nected solid with­out self­in­ter­sec­tion. I came up with two entries for this self-contest (actu­ally three but I’m keep­ing the 3D Voronoi frac­tal for a bit later). They’re con­cep­tu­ally very sim­ple so don’t expect any­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary (or new), click on the images to go to the applet:

cut & twist, W:Blut, 2009

cut & slide, W:Blut, 2009