EIGHTY YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: DATA FABRIC
Sculptural installation to mark the 80 year history of The Wenzhou Experimental Middle School, Wenzhou
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The poet Xie Lingyun (385-433, considered the origin of Chinese landscape poetry, stationed in Wenzhou on the land of the first Wenzhou Experimental Middle School), lived long before our modern practice of ‘recycling’; and yet his writings of seasons changing, of rivers flowing and grasses growing, of nature cycling and recycling, of renewal and rebirth, on reflection his vision, in an age of sustainability, may be seen simultaneously as one both ancient and contemporary. This sculptural work, “Eighty Years in Perspective: Data Fabric”, relates to time then ‘as both past and future’. It is the material-formation of a statistical record of the eighty year history of The Wenzhou Experimental Middle School. This data-history is given form through a process of design involving advanced computation and robotic construction, so as to recycle (or more accurately to ‘reform’) sixty five old wooden children’s desks and sixty three chairs — ‘waste/material’ no longer in use but alive with memory. When we observe this wood, we see marks children have inscribed, its patination is built from their touch, the material embodies and bears their story. Each desk and chair has been analysed and disassembled, modelled and programmed, processed and stacked, reassembled and printed, it becomes a weaving of old material and advanced digital fabrication technology — a spatialisation of eighty years, a record of every student, every teacher, every class, every campus, every award — this data is generative of code, and through designed transformations of the old waste-material, a new wall (or mountain/ shan-shui) has been precision assembled by two robots, its stacking contorted and varied, a complex parametric mechanical weaving engaging a chronological data-based storytelling interactive of embodied energy and embodied memories in material second-life. It allows one to read the statistical evolution of the school and at the same time to contemplate a future both ecological and virtual. Essentially it offers a built perspective through which the school and its nature is represented as ‘past and future’.
CREDITS
Concept:
David Vardy
Xiaotong Shi
Jiayi Xu
Wenzhou-Kean Design Lab/ WKDL
Kuang Yang, Wenzhou Experimental Middle School
Computational design:
Wenzhou-Kean Design Lab/ WKDL
Robotic design, structure, fabrication and assembly:
Zhou Jinjiang, Yuan Tech Robotics
