Sunday, June 28, 2009

IFI Busan 2007


IFI Busan 2007 - Keynote Speaker

Lecture Notes
Organics, nature, flight and electronics

My first understanding of forms, systems and practicality came when I was a falconer as a teenager. For a decade before going to university I was motivated by the forms of flight and biology. A great deal of my time was spent trying to scientifically understand flight and the natural environment, this led first to my interest in Bernoulli's principle of fluid mechanics at the age of 13 and from then on to many disparate chunks of science and biological theory. At that time there was a common belief ( although in my naivety I could have been wrong ) that it was mathematically impossible to prove that a bumble bee could fly. Since that time fluid mechanics and the mathematics associated with it has become a great deal more sophisticated. However at that age I was becoming much more interested in the practicality of fluid mechanics and flight as an art, an intuitive process rather than a strictly formal mathematical one. So from that point on all the aircraft and aerodyne objects I designed where much more about feeling and form rather than pure science driven practicality. A few years later I came across Luigi Colani when I was 16 and it became very clear that design was the way I wanted to go.

Running concurrently with the fascination with the natural world was an obsession with art, drawing and film, and then naturally to media and computing.
For most of my life much of what I wanted to do was simply impossible because the toolsets available ( and the mindset ) where incapable of achieving the results I was looking for.

Within the last 10 years a convergence has taken place where we have been liberated from the archetypal approach to conception and realization. Only recently has my knowledge in flight, nature and biology converged with my interest in digital media. These areas of organics of aerodynamics and the self replicating multiple forms of nature coupled with the new found freedom of software have led me to experiment with architecture, film and computer game environments and their electronic interaction.

My work of the last 10 years has reflected this convergence. Whether it be production design for a film, generative installation or projection of a building surface I have tried to apply the principles and techniques I have researched over the years.

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