RoboBlox is composed of a sculptural frieze of breeze blocks, a video that shows the design and the making process, and an interactive game.
The Robotic Manufactured Blocks (Roboblox) departs from the concept of the French movement Oulipo: Open Artwork, as a continuous structure that seeks to create artworks through constrained techniques. Similar to Thieri Foulc from Oulipo's 2D rule-based Morpholo Game which involves a series of tiles arranged variously to create an overall pattern, RoboBlox uses new structures and patterns to experience space in an individual manner.
The proposal interprets the traditional use of breeze blocks in Brisbane as an ontological database oriented by the question of rule-based storytelling. RoboBlox integrates Morpholo Game's concepts on two distinct levels: the effects arising from a specific manner in which constraints privileges the multiple over the one, and the very fact of using robotic fabrication starts with the problem of customised multiplicity or as currently referred, mass-customisation.
Originally designed for MoB (Museum of Brisbane)'s BAD (Brisbane Art Design), RoboBlox's sculptural frieze is designed through a continuous workflow of digital design to robotic production, to create a rule-based storytelling. In this process, the traditional breeze block is reinvented using a computational interactive web interface that allows artists to adjust parameters in order to create unique patterns. These inform a 3D modelling software to compose a matrix of 18 x 6 breeze blocks. Using an industrial robot arm and a custom-made hotwire cutter as an end effector, the sculptural frieze of breeze blocks is then constructed.
The video contains the making process as well as short interviews with the artists, creating a knowledge sharing platform that engages people to explain the use of new technologies in the making of art.
The interactive game consists of ready-made 3D printed blocks, allowing several people to play to understand the rules by practice during the exhibition.
Bookings
Drop-in, no bookings required
Suitability
Acknowledgements
QUT Design Robotics (Dr. Jared Donovan, Dr. Muge Teixeira, Dr. Glenda Caldwell, Alan Burden), and UQ Architectural Robotics (Dr. Frederico Fialho)