Experimental Material Research - Digital Chocolate

Abstract

This research investigates the aesthetics of a shared agency between humans, computation and physical material. ‘Chocolate’ is manipulated in physical and virtual space simultaneously to extract aesthetic conditions that are a sum of human and non-human relations. This is an attempt to further the knowledge of designing, giving physical and digital materials force in determining their own aesthetics. The research springs from work in speculative aesthetics, particularly N. Katherine Hayles’s OOI (object-oriented inquiry) and Graham Harman’s OOO (object-oriented ontology) and explores how these ideas impact contemporary computational architectural design. To study this, a simple material has been chosen, chocolate, and used as a vehicle to investigate the dynamics of physical and digital materials and their shared/differing ‘resistances to human manipulation’ (Pickering 1995). Digital chocolate is ‘melted’ through virtual heat, and the results printed and cast in real chocolate, to be further manipulated in real space. The resistances and feedback of physical and digital chocolate to human ‘prodding’ (Hayles 2014) are analyzed in terms of a material’s qualities and tendencies in digital space versus those in physical space. Observations from this process are used to speculate on an aesthetics where humans, computation and physical material are mutually agential. This research is a pilot for a larger study taking on more complex conditions, such as building and cities, with a view to broadening how aesthetics is understood in architectural design. The contribution of this research to the field of architectural computation is thus in areas of aesthetic speculation and human/non-human architectural authorship.