Writing the next posts in the series “On Creating Objects” keeps getting harder, and writing their titles even more so… Only readers blessed with the greatest resilience and patience will get their reward…
🎬 Watch the video
📖 Terms
Yes, once again the time has come for me to at least try to define the terms I use in these little treatises…
Last time I focused on the dreadful gaps between theory and practice, and I also allowed myself to throw mathematics, numbers and digits into the same terminological, conceptual sack. Today, in the title, I put the emphasis on information, and on the role it plays: almost an absolute…
Once again I have to ask for your kindness and understanding. Words are swords, and sometimes it is worth using their unambiguity and swiftness; scientific debate conducted with pure and precise words is of great value. I would like to have such skill and such effectiveness myself. Unfortunately, I don’t, so I force, I lower the Reader to the level of the pavement, the commonplace. I tell myself that some good may still come of it, that such a form will spread the ideas I want to present more widely. In other words: since I don’t intend to cut with swords, because I can’t, I would rather wave a feather, and only now and then give a light tap with a finger.
For the purposes of my story, I assume that information is a higher concept than the others; it contains the others. I won’t strain for a very precise definition. I trust the Reader’s good intuition, and I hope that together we will work out the meaning of the most important concepts we use in this conversation.
🌐 Informational totality
In one of the previous episodes we noticed that information is the keystone, the common part that bravely holds together the worlds of theory and practice, which we so carelessly tore apart.
Information is the only property we should keep in mind if we want to exist wisely in reality.
It is a big thesis, but I believe that matter/energy serves information. Reality is the result, the emanation, of information. That is why, by dealing with information, by acquiring, collecting, analysing and transforming it (only to a certain extent), we gain the ability to influence our surroundings.
Last time we admired algae for their beautiful, mathematical materiality…
Material mathematics: on creating objects (in Polish)
I mentioned then that they are not the only ones that can prove to us that numbers are tangible. I left you a little unsatisfied, but also with a riddle… I wonder whether you, dear Reader, have found the examples I present below…
🔧 Examples
As usual, everyone knows them, everyone has heard of them, they are obvious. And perhaps that is exactly why the relations between them are so hard to notice.
Let us recall: the contest is about materialising our will, expressed through information.
And it is supposed to happen without any mechanical contact with the object we are making, an object that will create itself, as will soon turn out…
Last time we concluded that it is worth using a wave for this task. That is why we used light to illuminate (inform) the algae (matter) about where they should grow (where in space they should distribute their materiality).
Please look especially at the red algae (Rhodophyta)…
And whenever there are algae, we always remember the power of L-systems:
L-system plant 160bpm (YouTube)
Interestingly, the author mentions that the background music is a sonic interpretation of a single rhizome…
Another reminder: we harness knowledge and experience from the field of topology optimisation, because it greatly narrows the search for useful ways to achieve our goals.
3D Printed Slab, Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich: I recommend reading this, as usual, excellent work from Zurich.
That was topology optimised for strength. However, equally interesting examples deal with the distribution of heat:
All right, so this we already know…
To give our conversation a little dynamism, I propose adding to our list…
lightning:
The mechanism of plant growth was explored for us by Mr Lindenmayer, while the nature of electric discharges was already described in the eighteenth century by Lichtenberg. The page below presents the subject beautifully (I warmly recommend reading it):
One example of Lichtenberg figures produced in a block of plastic:
Let me remind you of the pictures we were looking at a moment ago…
Sources: DTU, Varna workshop 2010 (PDF, archived), Semantic Scholar (PDF)
…
“Well, even if it all looks similar… so what useful thing can possibly come of it for us?!…”
A great deal, if we keep searching. Then we will come across:
diffusion-limited aggregation
While the previous picture may still say little, the photo below will surely, at last, set the imagination going:
Because it shows nothing other than the way copper blooms out of its solution. A picture known to every electroplater…
🔁 Recap
A recap is usually a rerun of the fun… and here it is a rerun of a thought process, a chain of logic.
Notice: just as algae recently became our bridge between “theory”, numbers and mathematical functions on the one hand and tangible reality on the other, lightning has suddenly begun to play a very similar role… Or, more precisely and more broadly, electric discharges, the effects of electric current as such…
“How on earth can this be the same?!… Why does current search for paths and meander through space almost exactly the way rivers do, the way living organisms and our lungs grow, and just as our mathematical calculations confirm?…”
I don’t know. All I can do is marvel at this fact. And think about how to make use of it…
🌊 Consequences
Once again I ask for your help: how can we use what we have just noticed…
For a very long time I have meant to carry out a simple test: to deliberately manipulate the parameters of a typical electroplating process. The point would be to make the metal grow in a chosen direction, for example in a typical copper plating bath.
In normal operation we try to make the coating as smooth as possible, with the layer growing evenly over the whole surface of the coated object. Any thickening or roughness of the coating, usually caused by an incorrect, too close position of the donor electrode, is an error; such an event is called a technological defect. In our case it would be different: we would cause the defects deliberately, and they would become the whole point of the process…
Make the anode in the form of a pin, a needle… And use it to steer, to focus the stream of metal cations that will be deposited on the object.
There may be more of these pins: the whole vessel can be armed, and its inner walls can look like a hedgehog. By controlling such a matrix of pins, we control the spatial growth of the structure…
Then it is tempting to manipulate the current… Here, unfortunately, I lack the knowledge of whether high voltages can be used in such processes. Would it be possible in modified baths, where the actual electrolyte is mixed, emulsified, with a liquid insulator(?)…
I think there are many possibilities, and it would be a pity not to use them. Mars is waiting…
Polish original: Wszystko jest informacją – informacja jest wszystkim (2020). Animations rendered from code; images and clips marked “AI” are generated visualisations.