Hyperculture: Earth as Interface (2010)
article⁄Hyperculture: Earth as Interface (2010)
abstract⁄Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Interface Lessons in Agriculture abstract Two vitally important fields of work in architecture and computingin digital fabrication methods and in the development of interfaces between digital and analog systemscan find new forms in their combination with one another. Moreover, a recent such experiment in the production of landscape rather than building not only suggests a number of implications for architectural work, but of ecological, economic and urban structures that underlie the projects’s visible formal and aesthetic orders. This project, ‘Hyperculture Earth as Interface,’ studied the potential outcomes of modifying a commonly employed information infrastructure for the optimization of agricultural production throughout most of America’s heartland and that same infrastructure’s latent flexibility to operate in both ‘read’ and ‘write’ modes, as a means for collaborative input and diversified, shared output. In the context of industrialized agriculture, this work not only negotiates seemingly contradictory demands with diametrically opposed ecological and social outcomes but also shows the fabrication of landscape as suggestive of other, more architectural applications in the built environment. The Hyperculture project is sited within several contexts industrial, geographically local, ecological, and within the digital protocols of landscape processing known as ‘precision agriculture.’ Today, these typically work together toward the surprising result of unvariegated repetition, known commonly as monoculture. After decades of monoculture’s proliferation, its numerous inefficiencies have come under broad recent scrutiny, leading to diverse thinking on ways to redress seemingly conflicting demands such as industry’s reliance on massproduction and automation the demand for variety or customization in consumer markets and even regulatory inquiries into the ecological and zoning harms brought by undiversified land use. Monoculture, in short, is proving unsustainable from economic, environmental, and even aesthetic and zoning standpoints. But its handling in digital interfaces, remote sensing and algorithmically directed fabrication is not.
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| Year |
2010 |
| Authors |
Geiger, Jordan; San Fratello, Virginia. |
| Issue |
ACADIA 10: LIFE in:formation, On Responsive Information and Variations in Architecture |
| Pages |
379-384 |
| Library link |
N/A |
| Entry filename |
hyperculture-earth-interface |
