Home - form_axioms speculative design, territorial agency

DESIGN

LAND / TERRITORY / TERRAIN
PLOT / PLOTTING
COSMO / GEO / ECO
META / PARA[consistent]
FICTIONs

[world-building: design and narrative]
[terrastuctures: design territories between facts and fictions]
[digital/physical earth systems]
[terrastuctures: territory, design and fiction]
[territorial narratives, design and earth-systems]
[territorial choreography and earth-systems]

Studio / Lab

expertises

We design digital models to analyze and discuss what constitutes the territory’s complexities. We create indexical cartographies of selected areas in order to understand hidden and unforeseeable environmental (anthropic or geological) hazards, for preparing alternative, ecologically sustainable responses to them. Computationally based cognitively reconstructed models serve the purpose of visualizing the network of ecological niches that are currently or potentially threatened by active (or about to emerge as active) anthropic factors. Design and Computation: all stages of our research are thoroughly enmeshed within computational logics, as it is the discovery/invention of hidden parameters, being them digital or material in nature, that allows the designer to recreate “new natures”; infra-structural and aesthetic.

Computational Tools

We test new modes of visualizing complex systems (with multi-layered data) within immersive environment (either VR or AR) in order to facilitate discussion/confrontations between team members and or with external users. Immersive and interactive visualizations of complex territorial strategies are deployed with interactive apps. Apps are designed with two aims in mind: to create virtual roundtables where professional can meet discuss and annotate in space ideas and comments, to form platforms where communities can discuss the spatial implications of decisions and to give them a virtual space where participatory practices can emerge. .

Immersive Models

Models are made to understand the possibilities of enhancing local productive systems without falling pray to naive localism but to empower the transformation/emancipation of existing communities - and possibly to form new ones. Strategies and tactics are designed to creatively propose new forms of infrastructure for highly complex and environmentally hazardous areas, to design the built environment avoiding mono-cultural segmentation of the territory —the fragmentation of landscapes by infrastructural cuts and/or by spaces of inhabitation that have no geo-morphological relation to the land that host them.

Strategic Planning

What is an Idea? Plotting the function of a problem

What is territory? Conceptual machines, strategies and politics; whence one can build, reiteratively one’s own concept-of-matter.

“What” is a de-signer? A strategist, an inventor that is knotted between efficiency and inefficiency, an engineer of complexity, a weaver of multi-linearities, a qualifier and not only a quantifier, an explorer by default and a navigator by necessity.
To design is to invent diagrammatic practices that understand, by modeling, the non-linear surfaces of any “given” system and its layers of complexity.

[exploring alternative models of probable futures]; [plotting real_fictions, designing para-consistent realities]; [framing the “real” beyond what is "given" in a “reality”, to construct a new real-reality]; [constructing visions of/and unknown politics]; [envisioning a non-capital driven, environmental ethics]; [reimagining what “environment” means]; [crafting new conceptual structures for fusing spatial and political agency]; [committing to planetary and post-planetary design]; [designing speculative strategies; swinging from Geo-politics (material at core) to Cosmo-politics (conceptual at core)]; [mapping the invisible]; [writing the concept; tracing the latent space beyond reality (real)]; [de_signing the (emancipated) sign]*

“What we need is neither abstraction nor occupying, but the occupying of abstraction”

McKenzie Wark

formAxioms:

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Latest Events

March 26, 2021

Deep City Symposium – EPFL

Federico Ruberto is part (virtually) of the “Deep City”, a symposium organised by EPFL Lausanne. He presents a short paper titled “Function Collapse : : Abducting Futures” where he outlines a constructive ontology of “models” (describing briefly models of contingency in natural and formal language), the practical necessity of designing at multiple scales through a…

2021_National Gallery Singapore_Roundtable

January 19, 2021

National Gallery Singapore_Roundtable

Federico Ruberto presents “Negentropic Fields” (negentropicfields.info) at the National Gallery Singapore, Circuit Breaker Roundtable 3. The discussion connected art, agency, platforms and digital objects. Participants: Lucas Huang (NGS), Federico Ruberto (formAxioms, reMIX Studio), Urich Lau (INTER—MISSION), Chris Fussner (Tropical Futures Institute), Kathleen Ditzig and Carlos Quijon Jr. Link of recording coming soon.

2020_09_25_National Gallery_Negentropic Fields

November 27, 2020

National Gallery Singapore_Negentropic Fields

Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto are co-curating together Yue Han Teow and Urich Lau (from INTER-MISSION) the exhibition “Negentropic Fields”, part of “Novel Ways of Being” (press release here), a project hosted by the hosted by National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum. The online component of the exhibition-project ”Negentropic Fields” is finally online.…

September 20, 2020

Singapore Archifest 2020

Our students’ work is exhibited at Singapore Archifest 2020. See more here

September 11, 2020

Conceptual Models of Space-Time

Federico Ruberto presents a three parts lecture series at “Research by Design – Thinking Through Image”, organised by NUS DOA – National University of Singapore, Department of Architecture. Series: “Conceptual Models of Space | Time” -PART 1__ “Technologies of Space from Classicism to (Post-)Modernity” -PART 2__“Tectonic Games (of the Digital): Parts/Wholes – Relations” -PART 3__“Ontology…

September 2, 2020

practice: plotting fields

Eva Castro’s lecturing at the University of Melbourne School of Design: “practice: plotting fields” Link to the event: https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/events/msd-at-home/msd-at-home-with-eva-castro Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCzHnenxaZY The lecture attempts to thread a set of recurrent interests through the various scales, times, types and cultures the research and the works unfolded stemmed from —from plasma to groundlab to…

more events

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

Jeff VanderMeer

Territorial Scale

Agenda [China_Nepal_South China Sea]

China

Nepal

South China Sea

Architectural Scale

Core Studio II [Space_Fiction (virtual reality, cinema and story-telling)]

“In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire […] In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography”

Jorge Luis Borges

Latest Studio Projects

Students’ projects

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