Digital Chopping

Digital Chopping is a series of procedural sculptures that are currently being fabricated. It explores the potential of a platonic form, a cube, by iteratively transforming it into more complex geometries through simple set of rules applied in each step.

As a formal exploration, digital chopping looks for formal dichotomies such as; arbitrariness / rule based, simplicity / complexity and similarity / difference. These notions cannot exist without their counterparts whom they together form the dichotomies, that is to say, we simply cannot realize difference without similarity, complexity without simplicity, or arbitrariness without any kinds of rules. Digital Chopping tries to encode this notions into visual forms.

The rules that are applied on each step are two basic transformations: rotation and splitting. The initial object is splitted into two pieces from its symmetry axis. Then rotation is applied around three euclidean axes of a part. The degree of rotation applied to one part is the negative of the degree of rotation that is applied to the other part - in this case the rotation angles are π / 18 and - π /18. After rotational transformations are applied to each part, which takes 6 steps in total, they are “merged” together to form one solid, watertight object that is ready to start the next step. These rules are repeated until certain amount of complexity is achieved.

Due to structure of this process, the polygon number of objects increases in each step, therefore the amount of digital data that it is consists of increases, while the physical volume of each object is lower than the one before; ultimately creating series of inseparable yet differentiated objects.

In 2018, I collaborated with Alper Derinboğaz for his exhibition titled Space Graph in Versus Art Gallery in Istanbul. The exhibition was one of the parallel events of the Istanbul Design Biennial. As an extension of my research, I translated the procedural geometries into robotic arm toolpaths. Background animation was designed by Istanbul based artists Efe Mert Kaya and Maurizo Braggiotti. The animation is intented to amplify the movement of the arm by using a similar formal language.