Web: Biothing: Repository of Computational Design

Effervescent, undulating and curiously sonorous, the visuals created and displayed on biothing.org, primarily led by Alisa Andrasek ("experimental practitioner and research based educator of architecture and computational processes in design"), seem to span multiple gaps in the aesthetics of structure - abstract and concrete, biological and machinated, randomness and repetition, stasis and movement. Offering poetically proliferating architectures to experience and inhabit, Biothing/CONTINUUM research explores the question of where genetic growth, patterning and curvature intersects with the linearity of diagrammatics and computational replication in order to affect the ways in which forms and space are experienced.

The Biothing research archived online exhibits a rare combination of programming, textuality and visual expression based (importantly) in lived environments. As such, the functional and often in-situ element of each project provides fascinating interpretations of theory-meets-practice. Biothing projects include a critical rethinking of the rigid organisation of city-centre buildings, expanding the possibilities of sound composition software by introducing algorithmically based processes and producing new lightscapes to stimulate novel fields of perception of aquatic spaces.

"biothing/CONTINUUM research is exploring the shift from the technique-based approach that dominated generative practices within architecture in the recent past towards the more explicit computational approach by engaging with scripting directly in an open source manner - addressing a growing culture of collective computational knowledge emerging within a discipline. At the core of the work is an accumulative library of scripts and methods for their transcoding, applicable to the constraints of materials, structure, fabrication and assembly. Evolving algorithmic infrastructure allows a designer to work at the scale of information linked to various forms of materialization. Computational patterns are understood as deep in terms of their potential to produce expressions at various scales."