The Third & The Seventh

The Third & The Seventh is a beautiful, fully CG animated film made by Alex Roman that, in his own words, “tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.”

Many of you will already have seen the film as it was published roughly two years ago now but for those that haven’t it is brilliant and should be watched full-screen in HD if you can. I would also encourage everyone to watch the making of video and other work Alex Roman has published on Vimeo – (click on the vimeo button in the film player)

 

Black Light

 

This is my submission for an Art pavilion at the Burning Man Festival. It is principally concerned with the movement of light and water through tubes around the structure, aiming to create an environment that is visually stimulating encouraging reflection and the reemergence of a child like curiosity and fun in exploration. Different coloured fluorescent dyes are added to water housed in a central ‘spire-like’ tower. The water is steadily released from the tank, controlled with IV drip controllers, throughout the festival and weaves its way around the central space. The movement of the water. although controlled, will be subject to sudden internal siphons, air bubbles in u-bends and constantly changing shadows and refractions giving a chaotic nature to the movement to maintain the experience for the participants of the festival. At night the structure takes on a more vigorous life with UV striplights setting off the fluorescence in the water.

At the end of the festival the water tubes will be sealed and cut into small sections that can be given out to Burning Man participants as a memory of their experience.

Below is the animation (already posted previously on this blog) that I created for the submission to demonstrate the experience of the pavilion.

Black Light

Black Light from Michael Clarke on Vimeo.

This is a walkthrough of my proposal for an art pavilion at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. The pavilion is a network of tubes filled with water and a fluorescent dye that slowly travels from a central tank around the woven structure. UV lights housed on steel supporting elements set off the fluorescence. This model was an earlier design and as such has since been refined – a better video of the final proposal will follow.

Please excuse the jerky camera and the very dodgy shadows (I didn’t set a target for the sun direction): this was my first attempt at an animation using Maya. These issues will all be improved on the final proposal animation including the addition of sound and people.

The model was constructed in Grasshopper for Rhino and then imported to Autodesk’s Maya to animate. It was composed in Adobe After Effects.

Digital Representation

This is my submission for the Digital Representation module at the University. The first part focuses on learning how to use Bentley’s Generative Components to explore geometry and in particular ruled surfaces. The module tries to give an insight into understanding how to construct geometry and how the process can be developed parametrically. It then explores creating your own object classes and feature types to expand the abilities of the software and increase efficiency in modelling. Finally the module looks at developing an understanding of scripting and the syntax needed to code 2D and 3D computer programmes and models using both Processing and scripting within Generative Components. The second part looks at using the tools to develop our studio proposals, in my case the proposal for a pavilion at Burning Man Festival.

Alternative fabrication methods using sand

Following on from the tutorial yesterday where Jack talked about possibly casting his experiments with sand using a saline solution sprayed onto the forms created here are two further ways of utilising sand to create rigid structures.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/15402/markus-kayser-solar-sinter-3d-printer.html

The first is a 3D printer which concentrates the solar energy to form glass structures from the sand the machine sits on. I know many of you have seen this before but I thought I’d post it in relation to this specific topic. The link is to designboom, a great website with daily updates from the latest innovations in architecture, art and design. Check out the link to find further information on Markus Kayser’s printer.

http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html

The second is a TED lecture given by Magnus Larsson. He proposes an ambitious project to stop desertification in the Sahara by literally forming a wall across the continent using the desert sands as a bulding material.

If anyone wants to edit this post to try and embed the video from the TED lecture go ahead, I can’t get it to work with their f=video format but that may just be me.