2. Night, urban

Satellite night images of Athens, Buenos Aires and London (not to the same scale). From a distance, millions of single light-emitting elements (lamp-posts, car lights, building lights, etc.) add up to define the form of the full city. The tiny size of those light-emitting elements, when seen from space, diffuses the form of the city into a nebulous massing, where only a few elements such as thoroughfares and roads, neighborhoods, or the higher-density areas, are distinguishable. In these images, form is the result of the addition of a large number of minuscule units, in the same way that a large number of pixels define the image in a computer screen. This definition of form rejects the idea of contour, even geometry. It proposes a way of understanding complex formal relationships by means of very simple parameters such as concentration -in this case of light; adjacency -lit versus dark areas; or relative position -centralized versus radial arrangement.

1. Viral loop maps

What is the form of social networks? In the May issue of Fast Company there is an interesting diagram that explains the growth model of a social network. The model is based on the number of network users and how it multiplies exponentially over short periods of time, sometimes as much as 4% per day. That is why they call it viral. Each one of the circular units in the image represents a series of connections that originated from a single user (center of the sphere). No two circular units are formally alike since the way connections develop is user-specific: the same system generates an infinite number of different diagrams. This representation of the concept of the double viral loop, based on the premise that each new user begets more users, is inevitably centralized, since it originates in one person (user). The way the starbursts –white points- and the connections –green lines- metamorphose into a whole generates a specific type of porosity, evident as one zooms in. At small scale, when it is hard to separate both components, porosity becomes translucency and the circular units become complex, multi-layered entities.

In-form this blog! Form requesting your submissions

Form is now accepting submissions. This blog wants to be a participatory forum about the topic of form in art, architecture, design and everyday life and I look forward to including in it your images and thoughts.

Interested? Send me just one image (jpeg, 1MB max.) and a small text (250 words max.) of anything human-made that you consider formally extraordinary, explaining your reasons or making a statement about it. It could be your work or the work of others; contemporary, futuristic or part of the past; high or low, simple or complex; buildings, spaces, objects, experiments, everyday things, artworks, designs...just one image and a small text, so that we keep it brief for many people to participate.

Send your material to form@muchieast.com with your name, contact information and a few words about who you are, what you do and why are you interested in form.

An open discussion about form

How do we arrive at certain formal results versus others? How is form a matter of choice versus the result of a personal reading of a specific socio-cutural moment? How are formal results creative versus automatic? This blog is an open forum for the discussion of form as the result of creative processes in architecture, design or art. It is not a discourse about natural form and its perfection, but about human-made form and its imperfection, its inevitable arbitrariness.