AIONIC MEMORIA
SIAL Team:
Gregory More
These projects developed by Gregory More and collaborators explore nonlinear notions of time and change through the mediums of animation, programming, sound, print, and digital film.
Chronos is the corporeal present. He measures the actions of bodies and binds past, present and future together. Chronos is regulated, cosmic, infinite movement, guaranteed in the last analysis by Zeus, the father of the gods. He is time in all its fullness. For Aion, by contrast, time is only the instant, without depth or extension. With him, everything rises to the surface and becomes instantaneous event. He has no need of the guarantees of gods. He is volatile and provisional. He has fled before we can catch him. As Plato says, he is atopical, without place. He is the "without cause," the random. Language does not come to him; it unfolds in him. Its meaning is unpredictable. Aion's experience cannot be encoded or encapsulated. It erupts, untimely. Like the tale told by the actor on the stage, like the unexpected pirouettes of a graceful ballerina.
Ignasi de Sola-Morales, From Autonomy to Untimeliness,
in Differences: Topography of Contemporary Architecture.
AIONIC MEMORIA PROJECT
The Aionic Memoria project originates from a (re)reading of a historic nonlinear concept of time. The conception of Aion and Chronos are attributed to the Stoics of the third and fourth centuries BC. The Stoics namely through Chrysippus, were the first to entertain that there exists a multiplicity of times. Chronos and Aion as two contrasting readings of time provide a dualistic metaphor for the enduring and the provisional, the anticipated and the unexpected, the bodily and the incorporeal.
With the Aionic Memoria project a dialogue between Chronos and Aion is encouraged and traced, through an architectural amalgamation of animation and programming. Agent based causative environments are established and tracers are released into these matrices of change. Sense of vision becomes fallible in an environment of discreet vacillating computational singularities. This sensorial fallibility is the result of a spatial matrix based on volatile and provisional events (the Aionic). An informational memoria technica enables the tracing of movement and change within this causative space, sedating an otherwise infinitely nonregulated condition. The surfaces, curves and points are the visualisation of this informational memory, they bring forth the past, present, and ultimately future. A complex, if not perplex, reading of time through material and space. This hyper (historical) surfacing reveals the continuity of change over time, realising its corporeality from the tracery of incorporeal events.
Paper (in Spanish):
Nonlinear Animation: Time Matters and the Aionic Memoria Project
Chapter in A+A Architecturanimation, ACTAR Press (Barcelona) 2002.
ARCHI-TYPOGRAPHIC
Poster for ACME FONTS [www.acmefonts.net] 2001.
Project Credits:
Gregory More, Nick McKenzie, and Christian Küsters [ACMEFONTS, London]
Poster Statement:
More and McKenzie (re)interpreted type by blurring the boundaries between the meaning of the lettershape and its formal qualities. Combining the tectonic signifiers such as AF Screen or AF Video Wall and the geometrical qualities of AF Track or AF Cashier their experiment seeks to combine the sensibilities of language with those of surface.
Transgressing the boundaries where both letters and forms coexist these visuals explore the potential of moving typography beyond its two-dimensional surface. The result is the creation of abstract architectures in the interstices of both space-type and type-space. The existing ACME FONTS designs are challenged through a process of geometrical deformation and reformation within a three dimensional environment. The trajectories and transformation of type in this environment creates the generation of dynamic typographic surfaces. through space. A cognitive negotiation of the created typographic landscape eliminates any clear distinction between FONT and FORM, which in turn reveals the true nature of an archi-typography.
ACME FONTS website
THUMPA
Digital Film | 4:20', 2003
Project Credits:
Gregory More & Mathan Ratinam [directors]
Gregory More [animator], Mathan Ratinam [compositor], Jeremy Yuille [Sound Design]
SHORT SYNOPSIS:
Thumpa is an exploration of interactive forms and architectural spaces in
reference to the familiar and the unexpected, the Chronos and the Aion.
LONGER SYNOPSIS:
THUMPA is an experimental architectural animation. THUMPA explores the emotions
of intrigue and fascination with a 'new' animate form. This form is generated as an
abstract rereading of the ancient Greek notions of Chronos and Aion, which provide
a dualistic metaphor for the enduring and the provisional, the anticipated and the
unexpected, the bodily and the incorporeal. The form engages with humans who
interact by movement and touch. The mood then shifts, as the human agents
become less interested in the form and its efforts to gain attention. This becoming
disinterested and being indifferent leaves the characters alienated by the form
within the amorphous abstract landscapes. The production concludes with a collage
of forms, spaces, and quotes.
The THUMPA page
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