Uniform Diversity: Space-Filling and the Voronoi diagram

This post is a short excerpt from a paper recently published in Architectural Theory Review 15(2) - a special issue on architecture and geometry with lots of good (Australian) stuff. My paper (pdf) is a critical look at space-filling geometry in generative design. It touches on several things already blogged - the Water Cube and ideal foams, and some generative projects that use self-limiting growth. This excerpt looks at the Voronoi diagram as a space-filling process.

The Voronoi diagram has become a ubiquitous motif in recent generative architecture and design. It, too, can be usefully read as a space-filling model. In formal terms, a Voronoi diagram is a way of dividing up space into regions so that, for a given set of sites within that space, each region contains all points in the space that are closer to one site than any other. The result is also foam-like, but as a model the Voronoi diagram has attributes quite different to the ideal Kelvin or Weaire Phelan foams.

Firstly, while the formal model is again based on a strict set of conditions (in this case proximity) it works with an arbitrary input — the given sites —rather than defining a regular structure. The Voronoi is thus a procedural geometric structure in a way that the ideal foams are not: its structure emerges through the application of a specific process or algorithm to a given set of inputs. In this way, the specific spatial relations between neighbouring cells depend on, and emerge locally from, the given spatial relations of the specified sites. This trait also gives the Voronoi model a kind of malleability; sites can be added, removed, or moved, and the spatial structure readily adapts

Again we can read off the attributes of the Voronoi as a model in this way. It is multiplicitous, but in a different way to the grid-like uniformity of the foam models. In this case, the multiplicity can, in fact, be irregular: the sites can be positioned anywhere within a given space. However, this does not amount to much, in terms of heterogeneity: while the sites can be positioned arbitrarily, the procedure, and the relation between sites that it encodes, is entirely uniform. Each site, taken as a formal entity, is identical to every other; this is a kind of uniform diversity. Like the foam models, the Voronoi diagram treats space as indefinite and extensive: it can go on forever; its only practical limit being the computational resources required to calculate the diagram. The model itself has no way of defining an edge or bound. Finally, the variability of the Voronoi can be phrased another way, as arbitrariness; in other words, that there is no inherent reason for a given site to be where it is. There is nothing internal to the model that can generate that differentiation.

In Marc Newson's Voronoi Shelf, for example (above), we see a characteristically organic variety: a range of cell sizes and shapes, different wall thicknesses, all in an agreeable state of harmony. The form gives an impression of inherent logic. It is as if the harmony of the relationships between the cell sites assures us that there must be a reason for them to be as they are. This is unsurprising, given our familiarity with, and aesthetic attunement to, naturally occurring structures that resemble these cells. The visual signature carries an association of organic logic: but in formal fact the cell sites are arbitrary, that is to say, designed. There is no necessary relation of one to another, only (we can but assume) a designer's choice, which is concealed by an appearance, much as the surface of the Water Cube conceals the regularity of its foam model.


Conversely, some designers directly address the arbitrary input to the Voronoi diagram, treating it as an opportunity and exploiting the malleability of the model. As Dimitris Gourdoukis writes, "the problem of deciding on the initial set of points is, I think, one of the most interesting in relation to voronoi diagrams." In Gourdoukis' Algorithmic Body project (above), the locations of the Voronoi sites are specified by a second generative system, a cellular automaton; here the Voronoi acts as a geometric filter, interpreting and interpolating one set of spatial data into another. In Marc Fornes' POLYTOP, the designer proposes a mass-customised product in which customers can design the point cloud that drives the Voronoi geometry; here a problem of arbitrary choice is turned into a feature, towards uniqueness and specificity.

Read More...

Summary only...

This is Data? Arguing with Data Baby

These IBM commercials are gorgeous, lavish examples of modern motion graphics from Motion Theory. Like some of the agency's earlier work, and a handful of other examples noted here, these ads show how code-literate design (could we call it the P factor?) is transforming this field. For all those reasons, I love this work; but it also really bothers me. I'll try to explain.

IBM - Data Baby from John Stanch on Vimeo.

The opening line of this voiceover says it all, really. This is data. Making that call - defining what data is - is a powerful cultural gesture right now, because as I've argued before data as an idea or a figure is both highly charged and strangely abstract. It makes a lot of sense for a corporation like IBM to stake a claim on data; this stuff is somehow both blessing and curse, precious and ubiquitous, immaterial and material. IBM promises here to help with the wrangling, but also, most powerfully, to show us what data is.

So, what is data here? In these commercials data is first and foremost material. It is a physical stuff. In Data Baby it wraps a little infant like some kind of luminescent placenta, drifting away into the air, thrown off in shimmering waves as the child breathes. In Data Energy it trails like a cloud behind a tram, and spins with the blades of a wind turbine. A lot of the (beautiful) animation work here has been devoted to simulating behaviour, making this colorful, abstract stuff seem to be tightly embedded in the world with us. What that means is both coupling it tightly to real objects, and supplying it with immanent dynamics - making it drift, disperse or twirl.

IBM Data Energy from Michael Suarez on Vimeo.

The second interesting property of data here - related to the first - is that it just exists. Look again at Data Baby, and note that there is no visible sign of this data being gathered (or rather, made). No oxygen saturation meter, no wires, no tubes, no electrodes. Not a transducer in sight. Not until the closing wide shot do we even see a computer. (This is fascinating in itself; IBM (or their ad agency) gets it that the computer is no longer the right image, or metaphor, for "information technology". Neither is the network; now it's immanent, abundant data.) In other words data here is not gathered, measured, stored or transmitted - or not that we can see. It just is, and it seems to be inherent in the objects it refers to; Data Baby is "generating" data as easily as breathing.

Completing this visual data-portrait are some other related themes: data is multiplicitous and plentiful, it's diverse (many colours and shapes) but ultimately harmonious and beautiful - in Data Transportation it looks like an urban-scale 3d Kandinsky painting.

Several things bother me about this portrayal. The first is the same is the reason I love it: it's powerfully, seductively beautiful, and this amplifies all my other reservations. The vision of data as material, in the world, is also incredibly seductive; my concern is that we get such pleasure from seeing these rich dynamics play out - that the motes wafting from Data Baby's skin seem so right - that we overlook the gaps in the narrative. This vision of material data is also frustrating because it has all the ingredients of a far more interesting idea: data is material, or at least it depends on material substrates, but the relationship between data and matter is just that, a relationship, not an identity. Data depends on stuff; always in it, and moving transmaterially through it, but it is precisely not stuff in itself.

You could say that I'm quibbling about metaphors here, and you'd be right, but metaphors are crucially important because they shape what we think data is, and what it does. Related to data as stuff is this second attribute; data that just is, in the same way that matter is neither created or destroyed, but just exists. This is crucially, maybe dangerously wrong. Data does not just happen; it is created in specific and deliberate ways. It is generated by sensors, not babies; and those sensors are designed to measure specific parameters for specific reasons, at certain rates, with certain resolutions. Or more correctly: it is gathered by people, for specific reasons, with a certain view of the world in mind, a certain concept of what the problem or the subject is. The people use the sensors, to gather the data, to measure a certain chosen aspect of the world.

If we come to accept that data just is, it's too easy to forget that it reflects a specific set of contexts, contingencies and choices, and that crucially, these could be (and maybe should be) different. Accepting data shaped by someone else's choices is a tacit acceptance of their view of the world, their notion of what is interesting or important or valid. Data is not inherent or intrinsic in anything: it is constructed, and if we are going to work intelligently with data we must remember that it can always be constructed some other way.

Collapsing the real, complex, human / social / technological processes around data into a cloud of wafting particles is a brilliant piece of visual rhetoric; it's a powerful and beautiful story, but it's full of holes. If IBM is right - and I think they probably are - about the dawning age of data everywhere, then we need more than a sort of corporate-sponsored data mythology. We need real, broad-based, practical and critical data skills and literacies, an understanding of how to make data and do things with it.

Read More...

Summary only...

Impermanence - Life by Projector-Light at BEAP

Another quick catchup post from BEAP, before it recedes into the mists of time. The Impermanence show at the John Curtin Gallery is a beautifuly-installed collection of video and interactive works. The gallery is an impressive space and curator Chris Malcolm knows how to deal with media art: HD projections onto custom painted surfaces, well-contained hi-fi sound, careful design and layout, and tons of breathing space. Daniel Lee's Origin (below)was shown as still prints and high-def video loop, and looked quite amazing; though the work in itself didn't stun me. Originally created in 1999, it's almost retro on the new media scene's manic timescale, and to me it was showing its age. For 90s Photoshop organohybrids you can't go past Australian artists Patricia Piccinini, Murray McKeich or Linda Dement - all of whom deliver lush surfaces with a lot more bite than Lee's manipulations.


"Nice, but..." just about sums up my response to this show; Lynette Wallworth's Still:Waiting2 features amazing nature-doco style video, with thousands of small parrots coming to roost in some enormous red gums in the dawn light. But it only made me want to be actually watching the birds instead of sitting in a dark box in front of a HD projector screen. Bill Viola's slowmo screen Observance is very pretty, but I just can't watch the overacting. The most interesting thing in the place was, unfortunately, an outright failure.


When I visited, we were told that Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's Eau de Jardin (above) was broken. This work reprises their 1992 classic Interactive Plant Growing, with sensors embedded in potplants driving artificial foliage on a panoramic projection. Ordinarily the artificial plants gradually recede back into their "pond," making space for new creations. But something was wrong and the water plants weren't dying, resulting in a kind of virtual algal bloom: the screen was locked up, choked with life. By contrast the real plants were not looking good at all. The ferns were shedding fronds onto the floor; I heard someone report that the soil in the pots was dry, while gallery staff explained the lengths they were going to in trying to keep the plants alive - wheeling in big UV lamps overnight, to compensate for the dim projector-light of their daytime life. The disjunction was stark; the polarity flipped on the happy techno/bio mix that characterises much of Sommerer and Mignonneau's work. It ocurred to me that a really useful project for all these bio-artists would be to engineer a form of plant life that could live happily under the light of a data projector.

Read More...

Summary only...

Against Information - a Data Art Critique

Next week I'm off to Perth for DAC, where I'll be presenting a paper focusing on data art. It looks at a good handful of works from the last few years, including The Dumpster by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, Alex Dragulescu's spam visualisations, Lisa Jevbratt's 1:1 and Infome Imager Lite, Brad Borevitz's State of the Union and some of Jason Salavon's abstraction and amalgamation works.

The paper develops the questions that I posted here a while ago, focusing on how artists construct a notion of data while they use it as a creative material. It especially considers the distinction between data and information, arguing that data art often works to defer, abstract or undermine information - in the sense of a formed or contextualised message - and instead offers us a more open or underdetermined experience of the data as abstract pattern and relation. The problem here is that we can't have unmediated access to the abstract data - it's always mapped to something, structured in ways extraneous to the dataset. And data itself is always extracted, made or constructed, not some kind of autonomous digital object.

The case studies are clumped around four data-figures: indexical data - data as a sign of something real - as in The Dumpster and We Feel Fine; abject data - data as empty and malleable, as in Dragulescu's work; Lisa Jevbratt's data material or Infome; and data as anti-content or "artist's squint" in Salavon's work and Borevitz's State of the Union.

Anyhow, here's the full paper (3.3Mb pdf). Feedback very welcome, of course.

(update: the pdf file was corrupt, sorry - fixed now)

Read More...

Summary only...