Indisposable investigates the spatiality of plastics and the politics they hold in spaces as partaking materials. Emerging from a plastic sheet, that is stimulated by multiple wind-producing machines from below, together they enact the plastic sheet’s wave-like movements. The installation is conceptualized and built around concerns of plastics’ influential role in the realms of contemporary geology and ecology and aims at amplifying their own powerful spatial-political agency. Along with the production of undulations Indisposable focuses on the spatiality of plastics at the example of bodies of water.

In their history plastics share at least two reference points with bodies of water: As natural oil and gas reservoirs, that grow as sediments in the ground of the seas. But also as macro- and micro plastics, when they return to these seas, rivers, lakes and beaches as plastic debris - this time not only as a sediment in the ground, but also as accumulated patches of debris. This plastic debris is known for and intruding other bodies: not just bodies of water, but also the bodies of rocks, animals and humans.

Indisposable

Expressive Residue is the attempt to curate and assemble the waste, traces, rests that accumulated during my artistic practice. The project playfully investigates notions of 'main work' and 'by-product' through an inverted perspective. At the example of 3D-printing Expressive Residue collects, sorts, and displays what usually gets thrown away and investigates the expressivity of PLA residue like brims, support structures, failed prints, trash. In consequence Expressive Residue accumulates as a deconstruction of artistic intention on the one hand, and construction of intuition of the tool on the other hand.

Expressive Residue

*1000 Behaviors* is an experimental framework for observing and evolving the movement behaviors of a robot. Consisting of nine collaborating servo motor segments, that are connected by joints, the robot performs its movements based on generated and processed data to find its most optimized behavior.

Data structure
The movement data of the robotsnake are structured in generations, behaviors and units. Each unit is representing one motor and contains the values that prescribe the oscillating movements of the motors. Each behavior is formed by nine motors. And each generation constists of 1000 of these behaviors.

Data gathering
For each new generation the robot tests all behaviors. By performing the prescribed movements from that behavior in a certain amount of time and in front of an observer. The observer helps the robot evaluating its behaviors by giving each one a quantified rating. Usually the observer is a person who gives this rating based on intuitive criteria.

Selection process
After all tests are completed, the data from the behaviors of the robot are being sorted by their ratings and then mutated and recombined, so that 1000 new behaviors can then be generated.

In this process the robot's 1000 behaviors are consistently evolving, influenced by many observers, the framework and the robot itself.

Conceptual support by Prof. Ralf Baecker
Project developed at the Digital Media Bremen program

1000 Behaviors

Mutiertes L-System is the physically grown L-system algorithm. From a software origin as a L-System rule, it migrates into the physical world. By mutating and developing situational architectural structures it adapts to its new spatial living planet.

As L-systems have gained much popularity in the creative coding community, deriving from one of the most common established practices in biology and media informatics for modeling plants, applied in simulations, computer games and CGI-driven movies, L-systems have a strong influence on how plants are being represented in the media and therefore also on how we perceive and value them.

The biologist Aristid Lindenmayer initially designed L-systems in 1968 for modeling the behavior of plant cells. Later Lindenmayer reworked L-systems towards modeling whole plant organisms.

L-systems on the one hand are used for researching "principles that unify apparently diverse phenomena", as the "Biological Modeling and Visualization research group" states on their website "Algorithmic Botany". This explicit agenda of unifying the diversity of plants’ growth processes shows how L-systems as formalizations are being inherently reductionist. Here L-systems function as a tool of translating growing plants with their interwoven, interdependent and spontanoeus qualities into grammar-based, quantified rulesets.

On the other hand L-systems are an important tool in the practices of creative coding for synthesizing images of plants in an often naturalist approach and offer an important interface of blending phenomena labeled as 'natural' into the realms of the 'artificial'.

Both applications have a common focus on the outer hull of plants and their architectural structure and less on the biochemical processes that actually cause the growth.

Mutiertes L-System

This work subversively explores these processes of formalizations by reversing them.

The substrate of the kinetic sculpture consists of a carbon skeleton and plastic joints, that are being arragend by this l-systematic rule, that prescribes how every branch should generate two new branches, rotated around two axis and bent around 89.8 degree:

‘F’ ⟼ “Fx[-z-xFx][+z+xFx]”

Following this rule the L-system sprawls and in addition to that grows spontaneous support structures. These support structures disobey the ruleset that it’s based on, but are neccessary to let the physical L-system become as stable as possible.

Muscle wires are clamped from joint to joint to give the sculpture its ability to move. These muscle wires react with contraction to heat, that is being induced by transistor boards around 12 Volts and controlled via a microcontroller.

Conceptual support by Prof. Ralf Baecker
Project developed at the Digital Media Bremen program

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