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Seminar Brief

Today we see a strong potential for an explosion of new design methods taking form through robotics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence. Machine becomes a part of the landscape choreography. Technology embedded in multiple objects within a landscape allows new regimes and metabolism to evolve. Through sensors and intelligent technologies, we are decoding the complexity of flows, behaviours and patterns embedded within the landscape, as well as learning communication systems used by plants, bacteria, insects, and animals. We can begin to co-design cyborganic living systems that think like forests, act like bacteria, and help us to create a multi-species polis driven by synthetic forms of intelligence.

Using modern digitalization technologies, such as photogrammetry or lidar scanning, we can bridge biological intelligence with its digital counterpart, forming a cybernetical biocenosis, existing in-between physical and digital realities. This biocenosis works at the intersection of the physical layer with planetary computing, where digitised nature, scaled at a size of a planet, forms a new thinking and living environment that we can experience through modern visualisation techniques such as Virtual Reality.

Methodology

The seminar will be exploring the concepts of cyborganic environments structured by the interconnection of artificially intelligent algorithms with the digitised elements of alpine landscapes. By scanning, transforming and analysing the synthetic nature of alpine landscapes seminar participants will be able to construct their own cyborganic biomes represented as living three dimensional models that can be visited, explored and experienced through web browser or virtual reality glasses. By connecting external data to the scanned environments participants will frame a mutual dialogue between the alpine landscape and its digital informational counterpart.

Learning Outcomes

As a part of the seminar students will learn how to use various 3d scanning tools and algorithms for reading, decoding and reconstructing natural environments in virtual space, as well as represent them through virtual reality. Learning through practice, students will work with various photogrammetry algorithms and 3d scanning techniques. The outputs from these algorithms will be transferred to open-source Blender software for additional modification and optimization. Students will also learn the Sverchok - add on to Blender, which will allow students to merge scanned environments with other data feeds and produce unique 3-dimensional models. Later, these models will be imported into accessible virtual reality environments, which students can explore and analyse.