Name: Brainstorm Design 2024: Ephemeral Tech
Uploaded: 2024-12-05
Duration: 20 min 15 s
Description: Alexander Groves, co-Founder, A.A.Murakami, Ismail Tazi, Founder, TRAME Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Alexander Groves, co-Founder, A.A.Murakami, Ismail Tazi, Founder, TRAME Moderator: Tony Chambers, Studio TC & Friends

Brainstorm Design 2024: Ephemeral Tech

Conferences

Alex, welcome Ismael. So we're gonna be talking about Ephemeral Tech. An ephemeral tech I believe is a, a name, a phrase you yourself and your partner Azumi came up with. Can you tell us about ephemeral tech? Yes. So a femo tech is really our approach to how technology can be used in the arts. And this is a perfect example of what we call a femo tech, which is our New Spring project from 2017. And it consists of a large metal tree that is producing these mist filled bubbles that can be filled with scent, different scents you can explore around the tree and they remain unbroken on different fabrics or carpets. And so it's a very delicate fleeting moment and there's a lot of code that goes in to the, there's a big kind of digital component that we work on, but where you meet the work is not one that fills that technology and there's a lot of custom made hardware as well. So we engineer it all ourselves. We don't use anything off the shelf, but where you meet the work is this fleeting ephemeral moment. It's not through your normal tech interfaces. Of screens or projections or led arrays. And so it's something that we're really passionate about is materials and the way that they make you feel and these kind of the tactile quality um of the real world. And um yeah, so that's um beautiful. I was lucky to witness this a couple of times actually, Salon Del Mob when it debuted with cos, but then it's also shown in art galleries of pace. Yes. Correct, isn't it? Yeah. And, and co actually toured it to Miami for Art Basel and then they took it to Shanghai to launch their online retail. Um So it's been around the world and um we continue to evolve this technology. And then the project we did the following year, 2018 was called Infinity Blue. And it carried on this idea of ephemeral tech. So Eden project is in Cornwall in the south of England and it's a big Biodome in an old form China clay quarry. It's an extraordinary place. It's the biggest rain forest in captivity in the world. And it's in these former China clay quarries. And we wanted to use the material of China clay. So we made a big ceramic sculpture and the brief of the project was, you know, excites people about the natural world. And so we work with scientists down there, we became interested with how life formed on earth and particularly with CYO bacteria. So this is an algae that forms in our oceans. It evolved 3.8 billion years ago. And it's the first organism to undertake photosynthesis. So it's really responsible for oxygenating our planet for 70% of the oxygen we breathe now is from this extraordinary organism, CYO bacteria. So like blue green algae and, and yes, 70% of the oxygen we breathe is from this. And yet most people don't know about it. We didn't know about it until we researched it and our existence absolutely depends on it. And so it was worth celebrating. And we made a big monument that's in the shape of cyanobacteria. This is a robot 3d printing clay and this is in the shape of cyanobacteria. And the ripples through the surface of it are also like how cyanobacteria grows. And they made these huge ceramic tiles. It's actually the biggest ceramic sculpture in the world. It's 10 m high. But we didn't want to just make a sculpture. The remarkable thing about cyanobacteria is what it does that it breathes and we are exchanging breath with it. So we wanted to add an element where we can visualize the fact that it's releasing oxygen in the form of these O rings. And so we made this technology that makes fog rings and they're populated amongst this tower that has these fog rings are embedded into the ceramics. So the technology is embedded in there and then the cladding of the ceramic tiles goes on top and it's, it was a huge undertaking and it has to operate every day except Christmas Day. A million visitors a year. This place, what size again is this 10 m high and weighs 20 tons and, and this is inside it. So it looks like a kind of submarine inside. And then this is, this isn't digitally manipulated or to think this is real photography that we took of it. Releasing these f this is not a bot image that's a real photograph from 2018. So, yeah. Um and at Azusa as is, yeah, my wife and partner in the studio is standing there and this continually uh pumps out this. Yeah. Uh oxygen rings. Yeah, these fog rings and um they can be CED as well and they can travel 30 m, they can travel the length of this space. And we've taken that technology and we've toured around the world actually. So without the big ceramic thing, we've been able to kind of tour it. And so the next evolution of it is called Passage of RA. And we showed this in Paris in the Grand Palais and this is an extension this led from. And what we did here was we added a digital component. So when the F passes through the physical space, it then hits the screen and it becomes a digital fing and it enters this live generated ocean, it ripples the water. So the physics of our world is affecting the physics of the digital world and this fing that's so fleeting has this digital afterlife. So, and this is our project M plus currently showing there until the second of February next year. And it's called Beyond The Horizon. And it's all about our love of bubbles. Again, bubbles are always used as a kind of momentum more like a meditation on the fleeting nature of existence. And they're also interestingly very like integral to science theory because um you know, there's this chicken and a question, what came first with the first cell, the first living cell, was it the cell wall that contained and protected that delicate chemistry from just dissolving and drifting off in the ocean? Or was it the nucleus that dictated build a cell wall? And so it's a chicken egg like how could one come before the other? But then there's the scientific experiments in the fifties, Miller experiments. So they recreated the primordial soup in a flask zapped it with some lightning and they found it was self generating these fatty bubbles of amino acids, the building blocks of life. And that out of that came this theory that the first living cells and our, you know, ancestors were actually bubbles and then they evolved to become to grow cell walls. And so there's a fascinating kind of for all bubbles. And then we're also interested in clouds and clouds of a long tradition in Chinese art. They age different Chinese art by the style of the clouds depicted. And so we wanted to create a space where we had these giant foggy clouds kind of populating a space and much like the emperor's robe that we just showed you. And this is what we did at M plus. And so we had these machines that make these clouds and they get strung to this trust and then they spread around the space. There's 12 of them and they're all individually making these clouds and they're really giant soap bubbles with fog inside them. And when you make bubbles on that scale, they lose their round shape and they become these amorphous shapes that um uh I like the kind of auspicious crowds that you see. So this is on as M plus. Yes. Yeah, in a large scale room. So this, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's the large space that they've got in B two, which is dedicated to art and it's, it, they're all working independently. Sometimes you go and it's dark and there just be one bubble emerging from this machine and then suddenly they all release at once. So um it's really uh it's really us using the medium of time um as the kind of subject and as a medium because it's a kind of fleeting moment. And if you, there's a moon gate in the space and then you go through to the next room, which is a large version of passage of ra the largest, we've done. And um that uh is also about, you know, the fleeting nature of it, the origin of the name it was ra is the Egyptian Sun God that, you know, every day would go under us in a solar barge um to rise each morning as the sun. And so, um it was really thinking about afterlife and um uh the fact that in a way when we look at a fog ring, we identify that I think this is really what gets to the nub of what we're interested in. The femoral tech is when you're experiencing something through a screen, that thing is not going to change, it's not going to age, it's not mortal, it doesn't have that vulnerable vulnerability that we have. And when you experience nature, like the falling of cherry blossom or the falling of snow, there's an awareness that it's a fleeting moment in this kind of eternal universe. And we ourselves the fleeting moments, sharing one combined fleeting moment that will never come again. And I think that gives you a kind of profound uh power that is difficult to get through digital art that doesn't really change your age. So this is core to what we we're going to move on to now, which is this conflation of digital digital being the origin of some work, but not necessarily the conclusion and combining the two which where we bring in uh Ismael and uh am MS latest projects just launched a few weeks ago in Marfa, Texas and Ismael. You're the founder of to Paris and a company that started focusing more on traditional craft, young designers, working with craftsmen and craftswomen in the Mediterranean. But you slowly started to embrace technology to really bring this concept to life. Please tell us a little more about your origin and what tram does and how you come to commission this piece we're going to see. Sure. So I started coming in 2020 as you said, we focus on traditional craftsmanship. I was as I was born and raised in Morocco. So in a city that is 12th centuries old, the capital of craft, capital of culture. But since I was a kid, I was always surprised that there hadn't been any innovation since in, in when you go too fast, the Medina, the mosaic, the Village, the colors, the materials. So what I was always interested in innovating in craftsmanship and what we are doing is digital craftsmanship. One collection we did was a 3d print in clay hand glazed, inspired by the mathematics, the algorithms of Alam and Dalia in Spain. And then we did generative tapestries in aus. We did mirrors um generative stained glass. So for me, it's about um the own chain. So digital provenance and the off screen and the physical aspects of the work. And that's a concept that I bonded over with, with your middle period projects with Tram was working with digital artists again, with digital provenance, but not only making a digital work on NFT, making a physical piece as well. And you kind of pioneering this, I remember meeting Alex now and this project which we will now go into deeper um called a 1000 Layers of Stomach. You debuted at Marfa Texas, the home of modernist minimalist. The mecca of modernist minimalists are Donald Judd. Very physical. It's an incongruous I would have felt positioning but there is reason for this. Yes. Yes. So um Marfa is the home of our blocks uh gallery which is the lead intern of art platform uh in the world. And every year there is a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage that happens in October, November where you have hundreds of artists ao of art and of design enthusiasts who go to Marfa. And uh and it makes total sense to actually launch this project there. Alex also in the past has launched a project on our blogs online. So a generative art collection. So it was, it was actually it made total sense and it is, well, let's talk about 1000 layers of stomach. You come up with great titles. Well, II, I mean, I have to say the best titles we get are actually from Chinese menus that have been translated into English. And uh we, we've done a few and if we have it at lunch today, no, I don't think so. Um But uh yeah, 1000 stomach I, I found it was a very poetic title. Very Sublime. And uh II I love coming to Hong Kong for many years now and it really inspired this project. So what I love is that you've got this kind of fishing village that's grown into this amazing city across the bay. You've got Shenzhen and in between, you've got this um tidal mud flats with these kind of crawling with life when the, when the tide goes out and the sun comes up, it's, it's incredible. And I particularly interested with clams and clams are like evolutionary wise, 500 million years ago, they evolved and they haven't really changed much since and they don't have a brain, they just have a kind of few nerves. Um but they have this extraordinary ability, they're like little 3d biological printers and they have this incredible generative code within them. And they can make these exquisite abstract art patterns on their shelves. And we really studied the emergent patterns, which goes into a lot of maths and stuff. And we created our own code that can mimic the behaviors of these emergent patterns. And each time you run the code, it always comes up with completely different pattern. But of course, we didn't want to leave it as a digital code. We want to turn it back into our physical world. And so we converted those patterns into knit patterns and these are the kind of knit, knitting patterns ready to knit. They're all using that algorithm that's based on nature. And we made our own knitting machine that you can manipulate the code. There's different dolls. So people in Marfa could go up to the screen, they could change the parameters on it. And then when they get to a pattern, they like they can press knit and it goes into a knitting cue and it gets knitted immediately. So it's very immediate and it's um very intuitive. And um and did you, you made this knitting machine? Well, I mean, you hacked the knitting. So it's a 19 eighties Japanese knitting machine that we stripped back. Recast, changed. The computer had to write our own. It was a very closed program that ran it. So we had to write our own um operating software for it and everything has changed except the kind of mechanism basically. And uh this is admitting a textile on site in Marfa based on the algorithms based on a clam. And, and I think this is something we bond over is the future of how generative can come into production. Because there isn't really a reason why um sometimes with clothes lines that they all have to look the same, they could always be unique um the same code but generating a different pattern and uh also kind of knitting on demand um rather than, you know, over um production. And so this applies actually to all digital publication and manufacturing uh tools. So I think, as you mentioned earlier, I think the future is where artists and and brands and designers will actually express their creative vision both digitally and physically from day one. And we would be able to produce in series unique pieces. Yeah. And as an artwork, we're envisaging having several machines come together to form these giant autonomous knitting clam robots that will be, you know, suspended in a large space and knitting out these textiles. And what we saw in Marvel was it first iteration its first. But this is a mat for something that happened. So we're going to bring the project to Hong Kong in March for Art Basel and then it's going to go to Beijing and, and then to Europe to different museums and each time it's gonna grow the textile. Um Yeah, and this is a in your practice um Am Aami but also studio swine your other studio. Um Filmmaking is integral to the documentation, I suppose was these fleeting tech moments and then turning into physical artifacts. But documenting the process has always been a key element and you called yourselves once um designers of mass communication rather than mass production, which I'm intrigued by. But tell us a little more about the filmmaking angle. Yeah. And how important it is. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we graduated in a time where it was very much like the feeling was we don't need another chair. We've probably got more chairs than people and so like, how can you justify being a designer and kind of adding to the amount of stuff out there? But then we always thought that um the reason why you need new chair designs is like, you need new love songs or poetry is that you've got to express your times, but you don't need to make a lot of them. You can, you, you can actually uh we make films that would be traveling the world telling the story of how something is made using design as a form of journalism or almost, and the film can be the thing that gets viewed millions of times and maybe you just make a few chairs or whatever we end up making. So, yeah, we're interested in this. Um We love working with film. Um Well, it creates not only a document so it's just you say journalistic, but it creates another artwork in a sense, it's another layer of the story and the future of. Are you going to be working together more this project will, as you've hinted, should be showing in, in our puzzle and the thing will grow. But have you since your relationship developed, have you inspired any other ideas amongst yourselves to work on? Because the core to this, as we said is digital provenance, but physical conclusion. Yeah, Alex actually sits at that intersection of design and web three. Web and Web three totally gets it like he's one of the few designers and who works with our blocks. And he is native to both Web two and Web three. So we have many, many ideas. He totally gets what we're trying to achieve. And I think uh uh you know, you introduced us actually in Singapore and any other drink. Thank you for that. So, uh yeah, we, we have some more ideas that we'll share in the future, but we can't wait to see how this, the world's biggest textile I would imagine is going to evolve over the next few months or a few years and see what else you get up to. But thank you so much for this extraordinary introduction to Ephemeral Tech, Alexander Groves, Ismael Tazi. Thank you so much. Thank you.