Sympathy can be felt only for things that are
in the making or in transition, that has a life.
“The only thing Gehry and Piano have to offer us is quasi-
variation, because their introduction of craft into design lasts for but a single, artistic moment, in opposition to the complex, elaborated methodology of
Gothic interweaving and braiding. If instead we had such multi-handed craft
working at the core of design today—and the digital is the first unified medium
of our time to allow for it—it would mean a fundamental displacement not
only of work but of the designer’s relationship to matter. ”
I agree with this statement because it integrates hand and mind in your work. It is like starting with the facts in any discipline and building upon it or trying to mimic its intriguing design and structure.
Infiguration
The flexible machine
Ruskin:”..mountains, churches, and paintings were the result of what he called
“help” and collaboration, and so should they be for us.
The truth is, life is abstract; it pervades organic things as much as
inorganic ones. And it is this abstract life of agency that makes the nature of
Gothic fundamentally digital.”
“The issue is not the technology itself but how it relates to human perception and
action, whether it renders them extinct or causes them to proliferate—life or
death, as Ruskin would say.”
“A line is a line or not? The inner life of things. Do you use that in your work? Wood: Lifelines.” I can’t help but think of Matise’s expression: “Remember, a line cannot exist alone; it always brings a companion along. Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume. (Henri Matisse)”
“Hand drew line versus mechanics. Is that the same line? Write 10 a’s by hand, versus a machine. Schema of an a: curve down, curve up, go down sharply, go sideways. Activated by the fingers and thumb, with a bit of wrist movement and a small amount of corrective feedback via the eyes, the schema turns out a different actual letter every time it is written.” As an art teacher, I can see a lot in the line of a person, you can see a freedom, and expression, you can see the artist through the lines she/ he draws.
Weaving: “As Ada Lovelace said: “We may
say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as
the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” 55”
“Code talks to things just as things talk to things. If
that, do this. If this, do that. The code is not immaterial; it speaks the language
matter speaks. This means its instructions tell matter not just to do something
but also to stop doing it at a certain point. But speaking a simple language
does not result in a simple outcome—far from it.”
In my opinion, it is an equal process in creating painting, when you paint you work in layers and at a certain point you stop and call the painting finished, just in time to keep the structure of your thoughts.
“In short, this code is an algorithmic,
a stepwise procedure that works over a period of time, in which certain actions
are initiated, executed, and then stopped, to be overtaken by the next set of
actions, and so on, until completion—if any.”
Passage of Patterns:
“Step by step, we will try to describe how each
level becomes responsible for tackling a set of design problems within the
morphology of the structure: Redundancy, Changefulness, Rigidity, Naturalism, Savageness, Grotesqueness.
Bentley and Humphreys’s magnificent 1931 book, Snow Crystals, which depicts no fewer than 2,453 snowflakes, no two, of course, the same.
What we think happens in space (“form”) actually
occurs in time (“formation”).
The pattern is not an index of order but the
expression of transfiguration. It is all in the passage. The pattern is something
that occurs as much as something that exists: a conflation of making and
made.
Morris is crystal- clear in his Some Hints on Pattern Designing of 1881, in
which he proposes a “newborn Gothic”: 50
As to the construction of patterns, the change was simply this: continuous
the growth of curved lines took the place of mere contiguity, or of the
interlacement of straight lines. 51
We need S-figures for serpentines and
J-figures for tendrils, C-figures for bending, Y-figures for bifurcations,
and T-figures for branching, and even X-figures for crossing and bouncing
and Z-figures for zigzagging, and all of them must be able to deploy all
possible variations in direction and speed, i.e., force and action, plus all
possible forms of interaction enabling the formation of configurations.
A pattern is never an image, nor a multiplication of images; it is essential that the type of multiplication abstracts the images in the pattern or that the images abstract
themselves enough to invent their own form of multiplication.
George Bain. Example of a method of construction for the Book of Kells. Plate R
from Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction (1945).
We have seen hundreds of buildings with copper cladding
acquiring patinas, and modernist boxes overgrown with ivy or cladded with
rectangular wooden panels with visible joints and strong visible grain—but
THE MATTER OF ORNAMENT 95
does the grain in any way manage the tessellated geometry of the panel (let
alone the windows)? No, not at all. Formulated in Worringer’s words, it
solves no problem; it merely replaces the sympathy lacking in the design with
the psychology of naturalism. There is simply no Stoffwechsel, the sympathy
is not in the architecture but all in the building material. Natural texture
should always be transformed into an artificial ornament.
P is in the function, but F is also in a Pattern.
Mondrian found his predecessors not in Cézanne and Monet but in Jones and Dresser. 58
Decorative art began to supply the fine arts with order and abstraction—
though an abstraction without making, without transition—taking a fatal
turn against sympathy and tenderness.
George Field chromatic colors
The mechanism, called a reaction-diffusion system, begins by
diffusing chemicals in a medium, in this case, an animal’s skin, but this
diffusion, i.e., the population of a surface, operates via a double chemical
reaction—one that activates more of the same and one that inhibits it—
which occurs in waves over the surface of the skin, thereby expressing
a pattern of black and white stripes, i.e., lines. The skin is, of course, not a flat
a surface like a rug but is wrapped around the three- dimensional shape of the
animal, its neck, legs, and torso, in short, it’s massing.
A material can never meet another directly; there will always be the
thinnest possible sheet of design between them. The design is a veil between
things, whether they are organic or inorganic, artificial or natural.
xDecoration is not about play or fun, as I hope to have made clear; it is the
most serious and rigorous part of a design. It demands incredible precision
and discipline. The first thing one needs is relatively small, flexible agents;
call them figures or abstract lines, it does not much matter, but one precisely
selects a number of them, and each of these has a certain amount of freedom
to act, in what we call variation and changefulness, or, in digital speak, parametric behavior.
Our second rule, therefore, is: when using ornament, use many figures. The decoration is an art of the many, and an art of elaboration.
Now, third, these many figures need to be able to configure, to gather via
the same or extra sets of figures, and to deal with design problems as they
do so.
Fourth: the pattern must reenter the material
domain. Along with managing design problems, our ornamental patterns
should deal just as effectively with material issues.
the age of intelligent machines allows us to
return to an ornament.
But first we must descend deeper into the core of things and arrive at an
understanding of how and why they entangle. In fact, they do so because of
nothing but sympathy.”
I like to make a comparison with the Balinese way of decoration and their spiritual life keeping the balance between “good” and “bad.” in life:
Daily Balinese Offerings – a prayer for peace and balance in our world that is renewed each day.
Figure 1: The Cambodia flower is often present in the daily offers
The daily nature-based worship of Balinese Hinduism is a stark contrast to the mostly Muslim country. Multiple generations of women seated together over an array of little square baskets is not an uncommon sight; assembling the offers/ canang sari is a personal meditative process and a communal exercise.
Every day there is a lot of activity is around assembling flowers, biscuits, coins, carafes of water, for creating the offers of palm leaves, blessed by water and a burning incent. Each canang sari is unique and assembled based on the feelings or needs of the creator, or whether it is a holiday or special occasion. Each canang sari lasts only one day. During late afternoon the trampled peddles and dried out offers, are being picked up and replaced by new offerings. It is an act of faith but even so important they use these offerings to appease demon spirits hanging around. The Balinese believe the balance between good and evil must always be kept. Balinese woman spent a large time of their days in their house altars in the construction of these offerings, Balinese men plaid palm leaves day in, day out.
References:
Figure 2: Typical offer with incents
While I visited Bali in the seventies of the last century offers consisted of rice, flowers, and palm leaves, now you can often see cigarettes and wrapped candies appearing in their offers. They are so much more than mere decorations, they are the embodiment of the practice of the belief of almost every Balinese woman I have met.
Creation of the canang: A selfless and deliberate act
https://www.gadventures.com/blog/explaining-balis-daily-morning-offerings/
“Every piece in an arrangement is selected for what it symbolizes, or which specific Hindu god it represents. For example, the three major Hindu Gods known as the Trimurtri are often represented in the canang sari by a white lime for Shiva, a red betel nut for Vishnu, and a green Gambier plant for Brahma. The color and placement of the flowers also bear significance; white petals to the east representing the god Iswara, red petals to the south for Brahma, yellow flowers to the west for Mahadeva, and blue or green ones to the north for Vishnu.”
Baskets full of flower petals at the market to be used for canang sari creation.
The purpose: An offering for balance and peace
https://www.gadventures.com/blog/explaining-balis-daily-morning-offerings/
“The final crucial element of this daily ritual is the prayer, which is said to deliver the sari(essence) of the canang to heaven. For this, a jepun flower is dipped in water taken from a holy spring and is used to sprinkle the canang in a symbolic fusion of earth, fire, wind, and water. Finally, after the palms of the canang’s basket are bound together, a prayer is spoken as smoke from burning incense carries the essence of the offering to the gods.” See photo 2 and photo 3 below
Photo 3: Offerings placed on the beach at dawn.
Unravel the Code 