amelia gan - On Rocks

Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
GSD 6338: Introduction to Computational Design, Fall 2021
Instructor: Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo Lopez
Collaborators: Joseph Wu, Kenny Kim

This project depicts the quality of transience and permanence through the medium of shadows. Dependent on the projection of light, shadows can change and disappear in shape, and the concept of our intervention was to make this medium of shadow permanent. By conceptualizing the shadow of various rock artifacts as a surface, the second degree of forms grows from the newly created surface, dissolves the original artifact into the ground, and manipulates the process loops to grow and dissolve the form subsequently. As a result, the mesh's faces and vertices flatten as the rocks and shadows simultaneously oscillate between a permanent and transient state.

original digital rocks

'growing' from the shadows of original digital rocks

'grown' second-generation rocks

second-generation rocks with new shadows

original digital rocks (top left) with casted shadows; 'growing' occurs from the shadows of original digital rocks (top right); 'grown' shadows forming second-generation of digital rocks (bottom left); second-generation rocks with new shadows, alluding to an infinite loop of 'shadow-growing' (bottom right)

project outtakes

project made solely through rhino-grasshopper C# scripting