Resolving Resolutions

This project aims to reevaluate fabrication processes and expose their aesthetic propensities. A common singular and purely subtractive process is rethought as a multi-stage fabrication system through the rearrangement of existing steps, combining them with additive and multi-material-state methods. This new way of making requires the collaboration of multiple machines, allowing for more aesthetic opportunities of the process to be revealed along the way. Each stage has it’s own territory of resolution, which is highlighted or squashed in the interest of exploring it’s benefits to the overall form.

Resolving Resolutions involves a combination of stacking, adhesion, carving, and surface finishing. Blocks are stacked by one machine and adhered by another in the aim of approximating an overall form, allowing for latent pixellated qualities to exist throughout. Carving creates contrast between a much higher resolution of surface and the pixellated approximation, amplifying the formal aspects of both. Surface finishing increases resolution and readability by enhancing aspects of curvature, edge, and boundary, leaving elements of resolution from previous processes to converse with.

Nicholas Barger, Jack Gaumer, Brian Harms, Andrew Kragness
Machine Networks
instructors: Jonathan Proto & Brandon Kruysman
Sci-arc Spring 2013