The Tectonic of the Hybrid Real: Data Manipulation, Oxymoron Materiality, and Human-Machine Creative Collaboration

Abstract

This paper describes the latest progress of the design platform Digital Impressionism (DI), created by staff and students in the Information Experience Design programme at the Royal College of Art in London. DI aims to bridge human creative thinking with machine computation, under the theoretical method/concept of oxymoron tectonic. Oxymoron tectonic describes the process under which hybrid materiality, that is the materiality created between the digital and the physical, takes form in human-machine creative interactions. The methodology intends to employ multimaterial 3D printers in combination with data manipulation (a process that gives data physical substance), pointclouds, and the influence of intangible environmental data (like sound and wind) to model physical forms by interfacing digital and physical making. In DI, modeling is a hybrid set of actions that take place at the boundary of the physical and digital. Through this interactive platform, design is experienced as a complex, hybrid process, which we call a digital tectonic; forms are constructed via a creative feedback loop of human engagement with nonhuman agents to form a creative network of sustainable and interactive design and fabrication. By developing a mutual understanding of design, machines and humans work together in the process of design and making.