Excerpt from Algorithmic Logic Away from Home: Variability and Fugitivity by Mitch McEwen in Material Variance, Edited by Lola Ben-Alon, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

In the roughly 2,000 years between Euclid’s Elements and Rene Descartes’ La Geometrie, the procedural techniques that made space measurable and meaningful intensified in Baghdad at the House of Wisdom.  Al-Khwarizmi, mathematician, and astronomer whose major works introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concepts of algebra (into European mathematics), circa the 9th century, corrected broken maps of an ante-world, a world that could be thought from the potential reach of the prophet Mohhamed and only provisionally as a place to be traversed. Al-K̲h̲wārazmī’s charts and numerical lists included more than 2,400 cities, coded into latitude and longitude. 

Descartes’ Geometry displaces these place protocols– this Indian Ocean measurement of the world– to create a model of a universal method, relying on a non-muslim God.  If geometry emerges in Descartes as an Enlightenment project it is so as yet another transcription of the algorithm.  Displaced from the questions of place, navigation, astronomy, and poetics that the algorithm initiated as methods of al-K̲h̲wārazmī.  

I want to relate this to additional work happening in the field. Mae-ling Lokko– when she’s talking about the “big four”: sugar, rice, cotton, and wheat– there’s what she called this problem of “scaling up.” That is, when we scale up, we encounter and reproduce the system as we know it.  This system is entangled with ‘man’— what Katherine McLittrick talks about as beginning in 1492:  when we scale up the system of universalizing as we know it, we’re scaling up this big four of crops, as well. The plantation and whiteness come along with the human and the global. 

What I want to share in this chapter, in the context of material variability, is a speculative means of working at the intersection of algorithms and Black culture.  That is – if there’s a 700-year history of the algorithm before geometry as we know it, before the 17th-century work of Descartes– that means that there are 700 years of algorithmic work that is not Western.  That means a minimum of 7 centuries of algorithms circulating that are not within that rubric of the universal whiteness-producing human. There were 700 years of algorithmic production before the plantation.

See the catalog essay Black Computing: On Beth Coleman and Octavia Butler and Princeton Zoning Lab’s plan for Developing AI-Based Zoning Tools for New Jersey here

RECONSTRUCTING VARIABILITY: HEMPCRETE AND MORE

FELTING ALGORITHMS

With support from a Flash Grant from the Princeton University Humanities Council, Black Box is developing new expertise toward the design and fabrication of felted architecture.  The work developed a number of grasshopper scripts to translate needle-felting into robotic and CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) operations.  This involved the design and fabrication of felt-specific end effectors for the ABB robots in the Architectural Lab. 

This rapid research developed new ways of working with organic materials.  The Felting Algorithm prototypes remain displayed and accessible to students in the BioFabrication shed, adjacent to the Embodied Computation Lab (ECL).  The Biofabrication shed exists in the exterior research space of the ECL.   Felting Algorithms aims to initiate a line of inquiry toward renewable and organically growing, degradable materials, in the midst of computationally-driven design.  

Princeton Black Box at the Embodied Computation Lab, Princeton University. Assistant Professor V. Mitch McEwen with two part-time graduate researchers, Laura Fegely and Kaleb Houston.  Summer 2022.

Since summer 2019, the Black Box Research Group has steadily revamped a discarded 8’x 8′ x 8′ construction methods exercise into the smallest lab on Princeton’s campus, a facility dedicated to biofabrication.  The revamp included insulating with ‘hempcrete’.  According to regional hemp building material suppliers, this is the largest hemp insulated structure in New Jersey.

The facility is used for research projects and course lab work, including for undergraduate ARC311.

Spring 2022 students in ARC568 Robotic Architecture Workshop were joined by guests from Brooklyn’s GBA and NewLab to launch the first Biofabrication Bonanza — a day of demos, tutorials, and talks on biofabrication, along with hands-on workshops, robotics, and music. All at the Architecture Lab / ECL and Labatut.  Biofabrication Bonanza was funded by the Council on Science and Technology with support from PUIC and GSRC.

In partnership with Research and Development at Zahner, Black Box Research Group hosted a two week workshop on robotic prototyping for full-scale distributed construction.  This workshop continued graduate coursework from the Robotic Architecture Workshop, with graduate students cycling into the role of student teachers.

The fabrication prototyping for sheet metal was simulated at student’s homes, using the Cameo 4, a 12-inch width desktop cutting machine for precision cuts in vinyl, cardstock, and fabric.

Using the Cameo 4 as a desktop machine, the RAW workflow from CAD design to the generation of machine specific fabrication files/code mirrored the process Zahner engineers undergo when commissioning large scale machines and robots. Participants were exposed to the nuances of file preparation and machine tacit knowledge, exposing efforts that are fundamental to the production process but often invisible to designers . Paper projects acted as a stand-in for sheet metal components – allowing for simplified fabrication methods while still surfacing the challenges inherent in a full digital fabrication workflow for variable parts.

Below:  RAW Summer student work by Jessica Flores (prototype)

 

Primary support for RAW Summer 2020 was provided by the Council on Science and Technology.

Fall 2021 undergraduate students in ARC311 installed a metal and bamboo exo-structure on the Biofabrication Shed, working with Zahner Labs.

 

Black Box hosted the inaugural BIM Incubator April 11-13, 2019 featuring a range of panels, workshops, and performances.

Shown here is Robot Double Dutch, introduced by Amina Blacksher, principal and co-founder of Atelier Office.  Blacksher’s work is interested in unfolding kinetic intelligence and the embodied knowledge of the body in motion.  Her project for the BIM Incubator tasks robotics with rhythmic rigor, scripting ABB robotic arms through a familiar game touching home to many, the simple and sophisticated play of double dutch.

For more projects from the 2019 BIM Incubator, see the full website at https://bim.princeton.edu/

 

ARCHITECHNOPOETIC PERFORMANCE “WHEN BIRDS REFUSED TO FLY”

Concept, Direction and choreography:  Olivier Tarpaga, Lecturer in Music, Lewis Center for the Arts