LAB WORK

Our LAB prototypes models and concepts.

We produce futures through:

1. art projects, installations and performances (core lab projects);
2. academic grants;
3. and providing support to cultural institution and to other media/art practices in the research and development involving physical and digital installations, architectures and interfaces.

See here a a more detailed outline on how formAxioms typically operates when collaborating with institutional or non-institutional partners. The mode of engagement is quite variable and generally falls into three broad categories:

1. Art project / prototype commission

These projects sit at the intersection of research and development and allow for relatively fast prototyping. They are not intended to result in fully functional digital or physical infrastructures that persist beyond the planned engagement or exhibition period.

Timeframe: approximately six months for research and design, followed by an exhibition or engagement phase ranging from one week up to one year. We have occasionally worked in much more compressed timelines (around three months from start to finish), but this is not a mode we particularly enjoy, as it leaves little room for sustained research.

2. Research (non-developmental)

This mode focuses on the development of research around specific questions or topics, without producing active design solutions or technical infrastructures. Outputs typically take the form of texts, diagrams, and conceptual frameworks rather than deployable artefacts.

Timeframe: variable

3. Research and development (infrastructure-oriented)

This involves the creation of a new working infrastructure, or the substantial augmentation of an existing one. It requires a larger team and a longer research and execution phase.

Timeframe: no less than two years. We usually undertake this type of work through governmental or equivalent research grants.

Of course, these modes are negotiable and can be adjusted depending on the specificity and ambitions of the project in mind.

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See here our deck (coming soon), which is structured in four parts:

•Part 1: an introduction to the lab

•Part 2: art projects and prototypes. Interactive-Immersive Models: We test modes of choreographing complex systems (with multi-layered data) within immersive environment (either VR or AR). Immersive and interactive installations and interfaces are designed  to being autonomy and community, where alternative participatory practices can emerge.

•Part 3: territorial mapping and spatial forensics. We design digital models to analyze and discuss what constitutes a territory and its 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. Strategic and Tactical Planning: 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.

•Part 4: design through a granular, discrete grammar—“blocks and collectives”—which explores alternative collaborative modes of making through a reduced abacus of elements (elements could be spatial components or part of concepts…). This approach works with “bits” and pieces as a constructive logic, aiming to be minimalist yet diverse, to generate potential difference rather than mere differentiation with a constrained set of elements. Sounds abstract, I could show some examples if needed.

ONGOING AND COMPLETED PROJECTS

Negentropic Fields. Co-curated exhibition at National Gallery Singapore, 2020. Development and design of immersive-interactive. Environments. 

“Trace 2”, collaboration with Teow Yue Han, a project for Singapore Art Museum, part of “Can Everybody See My Screen?”, 2022.

”Unity and Multiplicity”, 4min animation included in Ho Rui An’s work “The Economy Enters the People”, 2022.

“Common Landscapes”, data visualisation and real-time rendering for the interactive feedback form commissioned by YLab-NGS, 2021.

Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale, 2020. Development of VR and AR components + physical installation (200 sqm).

Lisbon 2019 Triennale. Showcase of formAxioms work, development and showcase of AR and VR interactive experiences.

On going__HotHouse curatorial work.

On going__Centre for the Future – (SUTD with Pratt Institute NY).

On going__Collaborative Platform for design and visualisation, Singapore University of Technology and Design.

On going__Digital Gallery Extension (confidential).