MIRO ROMAN 🐙 WRITING IN ATOM LETTERS

towards an any cathedral

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Object as a fusion of multiple objects

Information technology is becoming increasingly omnipresent in people’s lives all around the world. The environment that surrounds us cannot be perceived only via categories of matter and energy but rather, in order to create a more encompassing vision of the world, the category of information should be included. In the abundance of information that surrounds us, we need to find a state of stability from which we can consider and utilize information.

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Algorithmic design, as a means of organizing information and thinking about space, treats the object in a completely abstract way, detached from the real world. Hence, it is necessary to restore it back to the principles of a pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. He claimed that something cannot be created from nothing and that something cannot disappear into nothing. This return would signify an upgrade to a different approach towards the object such as observing the processuality and context rather than just being restricted to objectivism. The advantage of processual design today is its ability to utilize and invoke all human knowledge. This inevitably creates a new perspective in defining the object or in deliberations on design.

It is not a collage, it is a fusion of properties

The postmodern condition defines a set of critical, strategic and discursive practices which, as their main tools, use concepts such as: difference, repetition, simulacrum, hyperreality; in order to destabilize modernist concepts such as: identity, linear progress of history or unambiguity. This idea is also reflected in the field of design, where the object itself in no longer the center of attention but rather its characteristics, components, ratios and structures are becoming the primary research subject. In the age of informatization, it is possible to reassert postmodern tools such as collage, assemblage and bricollage that define the object by compiling various data and elements. The newly created object is now a fusion of different objects’ properties but it is also completely unique and independent in form. It is an example of a new kind of recycling that we call digital recycling or recycling information.

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Example: fusion of properties from five objects – gothic cathedrals

The project “Towards any cathedral” deals with manipulating information (data), thereby generating a new object. Five High Gothic cathedrals are taken as the starting point of the project, that is, their geometrical and spatial characteristics (number of naves, the amount of light, the towers’ height …). By using open source 3D models of cathedrals, their basic geometry is appropriated and then a set of algorithms is defined which connect the default information into a new structure. The end result is an object that is entirely a product of mathematical and logical thinking. The object now becomes a product of pure intellect, grounded in history and culture.

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Metha Cathedral

By contemplating on the metha cathedral project, we ponder about strategies and concepts of designing via information technologies. What happens with objects when they are abstracted and reduced to a set of data? How do we get this abstract system to relate to the real world? Information technologies have opened up a number of new ways of thinking about the world and the object and they, by far, surpassed the formally simplified expression in architecture and design. Based on intellectual treasures of history and culture, information technologies can, by utilizing and recycling various elements and information, fully define the 21st century object.

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