ARCHITECTURAL POTENTIALS

My project speculates in utilizing self assembling technologies, chemical interactions and new materials to generate a system of migrating architectures. I chose two test sites for the proposal; the first is the city of Shenzhen in the coast of China, a city that in the past 20 years has almost doubled it's size via land reclamation from the sea; and the second is Great Garbage Patch, a giant patch of garbage and debri floating in the north pacific calculated to be roughly twice the size of Texas, gathered together by North Pacific Gyre.

In the first scenario, the floating architectures would be released in the bay and self assemble in the coast, certain aspects of their behaviour and location would be predetermined, but the stchastic nature of the system would permit a more natural response to the problem of land reclamation. Instead of imposing and 'breaking' the environment, this solution adapts to the surroundings and the environment with a much lower impact on the local ecologies.

In the second scenario, the floating elements would follow the same route that debri follow from the coasts of the U.S. and Japan guided by the North Pacific Gyre, though chemical processes they would release protocell technologies that create a web or a net, and as they self assemble they would trap in this net the marine debri and supended plastics. A third situation uses the oceans as a test site. Since the sea has a concentration of CO2 up to 50 times larger than the atmosphere, the floating architectures, moving by chemotaxis would find the areas with highest concentration of CO2 in the ocean and via carbon capture processes reduce the CO2 content in theat particular area. Once the floating elements gain a cetain size, a 'critical weight', assemble at the coasts and sink, generating new underwater strata that would serve as scafolding for new ecologies to develop around them.

Abstraction drawing of the Self-Assembly process: A disorganized system of particles

spontaneously self-assembles into and ordered construct.

Drawing showing photosensitive protocells.

This drawing shows protocells self-assembling into a net that traps marine debri.

Migrating architectures are deployed in the coastal chinese city of Shenzhen, where they achieve land reclamation through stochastic self assembly processes.

Above: Migrating architectures follow the currents of the North Pacific Gyre and

self-assemble around the Great Garbage Patch while creating a net to trap floating debri.

Below: The objects move by thermotaxis and chemotaxis reaching the areas of

the ocean with highest CO2 concentration.

Time based drawing showing the increase in size of the elements due to carbon capture.

BROWNIAN MOTION

Brownian motion is defined as 'the seemingly random movement of particles supended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called particle theory.'

I generated a Brownian Motion curve for each tile in the model by tracking the movement of the particle, pin-pointing it's possition at different time intervals and conecting the points.

Each one of the images above represents the Brownian Motion of one tile achieved by tracking

the movement of the tile with intervals of 10s (cyan), 20s (blue) and 30s (red).

Mosaic of stills used to generate Brownian curves.

MODEL V2.0

This round of tests were more focused on programing the environment of the model and trying to manipulate the particles as little as possible. The environment (watter) was altered in three different ways; for the first two, I added Sodium Bicarbonate to make the water an alkaline solution and covered the tiles with oil. For the first one of these two experiments the water was moxed with the Sodium Bicarbonate at room temperature; for the second one I created a super-saturated solution by boiling the water beore adding the Sodium Bicarbonate and then letting it cool down.

In the las set of experiments, I wanted the environment to be as 'active' as posible reducing the need for me to intervene as an actuator when the system reaches equilibrium for this I added large quantities of effervescent salts. The video below shows a few clips of the results of all experiments (including some of the ones published before in this blog, so jump to 1:18 in the video to see the new bits).