Haresh Lalvani at Design Miami 2011 - YouTube

i had met, just socially

doctor haresh lalvani who is many things. mathematician

architect

designer, morphologist, biologist

but i met him through a friend

and he introduced me

the work he's been doing

which is private

experimental

laboratory kind of work

with a very renowned art metal producer

in brooklyn, new york, called milgo bufkin

that works with anish kapoor, richard serra, etc.

and the man who owns that factory, bruce gitlin

has funded Haresh's work over fifteen years

to do explorations using mathematical equations involved in digital production and digital design

and when i was invited to

have a look around

i in my limited capacity

started to understand

and see something that i thought was amazing

and with their permission

to propose a project

which we could bring here

to show

certain

of these discoveries

which i thought was

the best way to own them

was to go public with them

so they trusted me

and the project we came up with is almost a kind of dadaist absurdity, which is

to offer in our booth

1,000 variations of a common fruit platter

an object of course where

customization

uniqueness isn't in fact required or desirable

but i didn't want to confuse

the process that we hope that would reveal

with an application

a proposal for an application

which is much too profound to

include in this one offer

so what we have is a thousand variations

of a steel fruit bowl

which we realized one hundred of them

to bring to the fair because of the size of the booth

limitations

and we created an animation, a dvd

which illustrates the morphing from one hundred to thousand

we drew that line with a thousand

although in fact this one algorithm fed to the computer for this fruit bowl

crashed after one billion of different designs

and that would mean if we change the algorithm slightly

another

crash would occurred at a new billion patterns

our first

hope was to

our first desire was to expose

the fact that all patterns in the universe

can now be seen

so it's in that sense of geology project

it means that nothing... these have always been there, we all knew it

but we believe you can now map, discover, on earth

every pattern in the universe

so the first thing

i wanted to do is

a thousand different patterns

which is already beyond our human

level of evolution to discern between those patterns at this moment

to show what are we going to do with all these patterns

the other phenomenon

is that this fifteen year relationship, experimental relationship

meant that

digital production robotic production whatever one might want to call it

these days

made in tandem

with digital design

means that there is no economy of scale. in other words:

these fruit bowls

cost the factory

no more money

to make all different

than and to make all the same

which is an enormous

profound change

in possibility because what it means is that standardization

is actually no longer required

and this is not an art project

this is a real project

where it costs no more to make a thousand different than a thousand the same.

what questions that raises two uniqueness limited edition

the values that we give based on that criteria solely

we'll see

but the marriage of those two is what this project is about.