Overview  

 

The syllabus guides students along the exploration of potential artistic expressions embedded within a digital deformation process. The course is divided into two: a lab component including hands on workshops and a seminar component with lectures and group / individual discussions. As the class engages with the necessary tools needed to accomplish these processes, the students are asked to initiate a discussion on the ways in which computational theory influences the arts, giving special emphasis to the notions of deformation, transformation, alteration, mutation, etc. The semester starts with the generation of a cartography of deformations, each including a title and a description based on their intuitive assimilation and understanding of the resulted piece. Students are then asked to evaluate, select and iterate from the broad catalog of expressions. In search of a final thesis, students elaborate a digital artwork that resumes previous findings and arguments into a video animation.

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The collection of images presented here organize a sequence of student’s projects from the experimental seminar ARCH 4709 (“Beauty and the Beast”) taught at the New York City College of Technology in the Architectural Department by Severino Alfonso. There are three sections in the course; each section contains a form-searching set of 4x4 images corresponding with a sequence of various levels of controlled deformations. The first section corresponds with digital deformations applied to organic elements and the second with mechanical ones. The final section aims to merge the previous conceptual findings through the production of an animation.

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Metamorphosis  

 

def.: a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one, by natural or supernatural means (Oxford Dictionary).

 

Assimilation  

 

def.: 1. to fully understand an idea or some information so that you are able to use it yourself. 2. to become, or allow somebody to become, a part of a country or community rather than remaining in a separate group.