punktiert and bRigid

Before the lab worked with generative models, it worked with particles. Between 2012 and 2014 I wrote two libraries for Processing, the Java environment of my workshops at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and released both as open source. They were written for teaching: each class in them answers a question that had come up at a student’s screen, and each example is a small architectural situation rather than a demonstration of the engine.

punktiert is a particle engine, built as an extension of the physics code in Karsten Schmidt’s toxiclibs and optimized for the local negotiation between particles. It allows hierarchies between several particle groups, makes no difference between two and three dimensions, and adds behaviors beyond attraction and repulsion. Larger populations can run on the graphics card through Rootbeer. The name comes from social science: punctualization describes the point at which an assembly of elements is perceived as one whole. Read that way, an architectural element is defined by its autopoietic condition and by what it does in an environment, and the threshold between the disposition of an object and its assembly becomes a design decision rather than a given.

bRigid brings rigid-body physics to Processing. It wraps jBullet, Martin Dvorak’s Java port of Erwin Coumans’s Bullet library, in classes that can be handled inside a sketch: bodies fall, collide, stack, and settle in three dimensions. Their shapes are built with Processing’s PShape class, so that a simulation can be displayed and exported as DXF for drawing and fabrication. The library owes its start to the jBullet examples of Giulio Piacentino and Richard Brauer.

The films show what the libraries were for. Gonthine, a series of sketches from 2012 to 2014, thinks of modeling as work on several nested objects at once: a line as the relation between two points, characterized by stiffness, strength, and distance, and a mesh as the result of lines overlapping, crossing, and netting each other. Point, line, surface, and volume formed the descriptive hierarchy of the Bauhaus courses in elementary design, and that hierarchy is still inherent to every CAD package. Drawn by hand it ran one way, and an element once defined was fixed. A computational object is not. Gonthine 01 and 03 take up Frei Otto’s wool-thread models and their reading in Lars Spuybroek’s The Sympathy of Things, and Gonthine 03 and 04 run punktiert on the graphics card, an integration made with Christoph Zimmel. Butterflies, made with bRigid in 2013, drops heaps of fifty plates, each folded at one identical angle, and lets the collisions decide the pile.