BODY EXPANSIONS
experiments for Antony Gormley

date: 2007

In these experiments for a series of body expansion works by Antony Gormley, the manual building of forms was paralleled by an algorithm so that the intuited rules of form generation could be systematically tested and clarified. In the many days required to build such forms by hand, a set of rules had been developed, and the experiments shown here are the final embodiments of these as implimented explicitly by the computer. The expansions are conceptually clear as offset uniformly from the surface of the body, and the degree of complexity in the number and placement of members are ideally suited to a model that can change parametrically and to changes in the pose.

It has been in the best spirit of synergy between manual and digital methods, that each process illuminates and feeds the other. The task of codifying the process revealed several insights into the desired geometry: the use of a truncated 3-dimensional voronoi diagram is more appropriate than simple surface normals, and the form of the extrusion can be conceptualised as describing the edges of growing volumes in space rather than individual linear members. These ideas, tested far more rapidly in the parameterised digital model, will in turn inform the physical pieces being built by hand.