FreeFormFab

FreeFormFab Tilburg tijdelijk naar pand uitgeverij Zwijsen

De voormalige uitgeverij Zwijsen in Tilburg wordt voor een periode van ongeveer anderhalf jaar gratis ter beschikking gesteld aan Stichting Ateliers. De bedrijven die zich bij Stichting Ateliers gemeld hebben vormen een boeiende mix van creatief ondernemerschap op het gebied van 2D, 3D, AV, muziek, keramiek, meubeldesign, restauratie, glas-in-lood, interieurdesign, goudsmid, webshop en fooddesign.

Daarnaast krijgen twee andere initiatieven ruimte in de uitgeverij: Starterslift creatief, dat zich richt op startende ondernemers en de werkplaats FreeFormFab, een kleinschalige digitale ontwerp- en productiewerkplaats die ook gaat fungeren als FabLab. Aldus de gemeente Tilburg.

Zie ook Spoorzone

Kwartiermaker FreeFormFab aan de slag

John Krijger van het Tilburgse Bureau RTE is door het bestuur van Stichting FreeFormFab aangesteld als kwartiermaker. Belangrijkste klus voor hem is het ontwikkelen van een realistisch businessplan en een bijbehorend inhoudelijk programma voor FreeFormFab. Komende tijd zal hij daarom met een groot aantal stakeholders uit de wereld van het (creatief) ondernemen, het onderwijs en de overheid gesprekken voeren en een aantal expert meetings organiseren. 

Uiteindelijk moet dit leiden tot de realisatie van twee centra voor digital ontwerpen en produceren om te beginnen op Stijp S in Eindhoven en in het Veemarktkwartier in Tilburg en een mobiel FabLab. De gemeente Eindhoven en Tilburg hebben de financiering van de kwartiermaker op zich genomen.

Contact: John Krijger
Mob +31(0)622950583

Workshop Advanced Architectural Structures

The architectural community has in recent years undergone a radical transformation in terms of the geometric forms being realised. Specifically, buildings with irregularly curved surface forms have begun to proliferate. This has been facilitated by enormous progress in the capability of CNC fabrication and design technologies. It has also been furthered by the endorsement of so many of the key contemporary architects such as Gehry, Foster or Hadid. The issue today is no longer can a design be built, but rather, which technique is best suited to realise the concept. 

Given the increasing interest in the utilisation of free-form building forms the Technical University Eindhoven is organising a workshop on the design of such advanced architectural structures. FreeFormFab is one of the partners in this yearly returning program together with TNO Industry, Rhinoceros and Kurvenbau.

The Program runs from 9 until 13 March 2009 at the Technical University Eindhoven. Part of the program is a series of workshops and a number of evening lectures that can be attended separately. Participants can be students, architects, designers, techno-starters and companies. Participants must be familiar with CAD programs. There will be a small admission fee. In most cases a small SenterNovem Innovation voucher is possible.

• Flyer (pdf)
• Program and registration

(Chicago Blob) More on Flickr

Code, Space & Form

Golan Levin has just announced a symposium titled Code, Space, Form, featuring among others C.E.B. Reas, MOS Architects and Ben Pell. Hosted from 3-7 February 2009 at Carnegie-Mellon University, it’s a multi-day affair with lectures and workshops, culminating in an exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It should provide an interesting discussion of the implications of generative strategies in art and architecture.

Algorithmic processes, harnessed through the medium of code, allow creators to generate complex forms and organic structures by the application of elementary but carefully-tuned sets of rules. Digital fabrication systems, such as computer-controlled laser cutters, 3D printers, and machining systems, offer a nearly instantaneous way of exploring ideas in new spatial and material formats. The combination of these two approaches represents an extreme but growing position in art and design, wherein the traditions of hand-craft are exchanged almost entirely for the unprecedented possibilities made possible through a demanding new form of mind-craft. 

Brochure (pdf)

Source: Code & Form

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Clouds for Kvadrat

The ground-breaking textile company Kvadrat is introducing another new design that revolutionises the use of textiles. Clouds is not about furniture or curtains. It is an innovation in interior design: a new typology developed by the brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.

Anders Byriel, CEO of Kvadrat, says that the soft textiles are making a comeback in the public space and in private homes. For many years there has been a trend of using fewer and fewer textiles. Curtains and carpets have vanished, and even our chairs have wicker seats and backs. Interior design has focused on glass, concrete, stone and wood, all of which are attractive yet hard materials. But this trend is turning now as more and more people discover that the soft materials are not just soft to the touch, but also have an aesthetic beauty and significant impact on sound in our rooms. In fact, we have realised in recent years how important the sound level is to our everyday well-being, says Anders Byriel.

See also Wallpaper Magazine January 2009

Source: Dezeen

ShapeWrap III: Motion Capture the simple way

The ShapeWrap III portable suit is designed to fit most people. When buying a motion capture system you must take into account who will be wearing the system. Most users, students for example, will not wear a spandex outfit. ShapeWrap III does not require any spandex.

Source: Measurand

3D Printer Fontys Enineering Eindhoven Operationeel

Donderdag 22 januari vond de feestelijke ingebruikname plaats van de eerste 3D printer bij Fontys Engineering Eindhoven. De printer is geheel door Fontys betaald. Het gaat om een FDM 400 mc printer van Stratasys.

Momenteel loopt vanuit Fontys een RAAK traject over Rapid Manufacturing. Daarbij zijn betrokken 5 MKB bedrijven, TNO Industrie en Fontys Engineering. De subsidie bij dit project wordt alleen gebruikt voor het opdoen, verbeteren en uitwisselen van kennis binnen de Hogeschool, TNO en de deelnemende bedrijven.

Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)

During the 1860s Marey threw himself into the study of flight, first of insects and then birds. His aim was to understand how a wing interacted with the air to cause the animal to move. He also devised some ingenious apparatus based on his graphical method, such as a corset which allowed a bird to fly around a circular track while recording the movements of its thorax and wings.

Source: Motion Capture Resources 
Source: Urban Seagull

Picturing Time
Book on Étienne-Jules Marey
by Marta Braun

Étienne-Jules Marey was an inventor whose methods of recording movement revolutionized our way of visualizing time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single-camera system that led the way to cinematography. Picturing Time the first complete survey of Marey’s work, investigates the far reaching effects of Marey’s inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

Braun offers a fascinating look at how Marey’s chronophotography was used to express the profound transformation in understanding and experiencing time that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Featuring 335 illustrations, Picturing Time includes many unpublished examples of Marey’s chronophotographs and cinematic work. It also contains a complete bibliography of his writings and the first catalog of his films, photographic prints, and recently discovered negatives.

Order by Amazon

Mike the Talking Head (1988)

Mike the talking head is a step towards animators being able to directly control their characters rather than drawing their actions. Silicon Graphics and deGraf-Wahrman Inc are working together to produce a new type of animation tool to allow animators to work with their characters in the same manner as puppeteers work with puppets.

Source: Motion Capture Resources
Source: Digital Puppetry
Source: Mambo

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

Eadweard Mubridge was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1830 the son of a merchant trader.  He moved away from Kingston in about 1852 to make a fortune for himself in America.  He started his American career as a bookbinder’s agent in New York, but shortly after this moved to San Francisco where he was to make his fame and  fortune. It was in San Francisco where his interest in photography really took off.  At first he was a landscape photographer and sold his views of the Yosemite Valley and San Francisco Bay to the middle classes of the town.  This began to net him a fortune in pre- orders and his fame as a landscape photographer began to spread.

His fame brought him to the attention of a former governor Leland Stanford and he was commissioned to solve an age old argument through photography.  Does a trotting horse have all four feet off the ground at any one stage in its stride?  After some time, during which he was put on trial and acquitted of the murder of his wife’s lover, he was, through a series of experiments with shutters and chemicals, able to prove that it did.  This was the beginning of a relationship between Stanford and Muybridge that was to change the history of the moving image. Muybridge’s experiments proved conclusively for the first time, that a horse while galloping lifted all four hooves off the ground. 

Source: Muybridge Museum
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Horse Locomotion

Graphic 12: Customise This

In its 12th issue, Graphic sets out to explore the current craze for customization -from recent trends in customized trainers, clothes and readymades to the latest series of Penguin Classics with blank covers allowing readers to draw, paint, design, sew, spray, scribble, sticker, cut, rip, glue-back-together or whatever they feel like doing to their own covers.   

This trend is more than just a reaction against mass-market blandness and corporate stiffness. It is also a welcome resurgence of individualism, craft and independence as well as a celebration of improvisation and creative freedom.

For this issue, the Graphic editors asked creatives from around the world to come up with toys, t-shirts, CD covers, skateboards, baseball caps, books, magazines, jeans, jumpers, slippers, pyjamas, cars, chairs, mugs, notebooks, postcards, plates, lampshades, mini-skirts, Russian dolls -you name it- and then customize them.

• ISBN: 978-90-6369-179-0
• Editor(s):Marc Valli & Richard Brereton
• Design: Matt Willey and Zoe Bather
• Notes: Graphic 12 contains 8 special pages with stuff that readers can customize themselves
• Format: paperback
• Dimensions: 28 x 22 cm
• Pages: 198

Order

From Control to Design: Parametric / Algorithmic Architecture

Along with the new architectural freedoms offered by contemporary technologies come new questions. increasing importance has been given to the role of parametric design, a process based not on fixed metric quantities but on consistent relationships between objects, allowing changes in a single element to propagate corresponding changes throughout the system. In parallel, recent developments in algorithmic design processes have opened the way to scripting and other procedures that allow complex forms to be grown from simple iterative methods while preserving specified qualities.

If the parametric is a technique for the holistic control and manipulation of design objects at all scales from part to whole, the algorithmic is a method of generation, producing complex forms and structures based on simple component rules. The question today is how these related but distinct techniques - the parametric and the algorithmic - will affect design practice. Leading practitioners of parametric and algorithmic design will be invited to contribute research and projects that illustrate their view on the new possibilities offered by these new technologies, their similarities and their differences. Rather than a compilation of individual projects, the next Verb monograph presents the work of each author as an extended contribution, through research and projects, that reflects a particular attitude towards the potentials of parametric and algorithmic design today.

Source: Amazon

• From Control to Design: Parametric / Algorithmic Architecture
• Michael Meredith (Editor), Aranda-lasch (Editor), Mutsuro Sasaki (Editor) 
• Publisher: Actar (October 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8496540790
• ISBN-13: 978-8496540798
• Order by Amazon

NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts

The relationship between the crafts and modernity has long been characterized as difficult and the crafts are often perceived as occupying a marginalized role in the discourses of modernism. NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts seeks to challenge the assumptions surrounding this relationship by introducing a wide range of scholarly essays that explore the historical, contemporary and future positioning of the crafts within the broader scope of visual culture.

The crafts occupy an important role in material, globalized modernity, and as such they must be understood through a multiplicity of gazes. With that in mind NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts unites an international, interdisciplinary range of writers who are actively contextualizing modernity and the crafts. Drawing upon writings in the fields of craft history, art history, philosophy, museum studies, anthropology, fashion theory, history, women’s studies, and design, this book explores in detail the shifting and influential cultural position of the crafts.

NeoCraft is divided into five central themes: Cultural Redundancy or The Genre Under Threat; Global Craft; Crafts and Political Economy; Invention of Tradition: Craft and Utopian Ideals; and Craft, the Senses and New Technologies. Within each of these themes leading scholars, craftspeople and curators including Bruce Metcalf, Larry Shiner, David Howard, Grace Cochrane, John Potvin, Beverly Lemire, Joseph McBrinn, B. Lynne Milgram, Janice Helland, Elizabeth Cumming, Alla Myzelev, David Howes, Tanya Harrod, Love Jönsson, and Mike Press, explore the reality of craft practice that engages with the modernizing world.

NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts
Edited by Dr. Sandra Alfoldy
Publisher: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Des
ISBN-10: 091961647X
ISBN-13: 978-0919616479

Order by Amazon

Three D: Graphic Spaces

Three D: Graphic Spaces highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films. The result is a host of suggestive new pictorial worlds that range from playfully arranged still lifes to room-filling installations. Edited by Gerrit Terstiege, editor-in-chief of the European design magazine Form, and designed by the prizewinning German studio Pixelgarten, this book offers an inspiring look at the various modeling techniques and means of expression involved.

Three D: Graphic Spaces, edited by Gerrit Terstiege, includes a design-historical essay by Steven Heller, an interview of Stefan Sagmeister about his typographical installations and various interviews with graphic designers by Sophia Muckle.

• Three D: Graphic Spaces (Hardcover)
• Editor: Gerrit Terstiege 
• Publisher: Birkhauser Verlag AG (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3764387718
• ISBN-13: 978-3764387716
• Order by Amazon
• Also see We Make Money Not Art

Resurrecting Leonardo’s Great Lady: A Collaboration

Sculptor Marilène Oliver and cardiothoracic surgeon Francis Wells collaborated to deconstruct Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing The Great Lady in order to reconstruct it as a three-dimensional sculpture. Employing lessons learned from contemporary radiology, they simulated cross sections of The Great Lady that were drawn in pen and ink onto a stack of acrylic sheets.

Here Oliver and Wells give independent accounts of the project, not only sharing how their relationship with Leonardo’s drawing evolved over the course of the project but also exposing the differences in approach by the scientist and the artist to a science-art project.

• Download article (pdf)
• See also article BBC
• See also Wikipedia Leonardo da Vinci

Marilène Oliver: Exhausted Figure (Engraved acrylic and fishing wire. 170 x 55 x 35cm)

Source: Leonardo Magazine