Second Life

Jan Cafuk

Juli / July - 2019

Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart

Diplom

Description

SECOND LIFE is a process for reusing disused structures. Based on the three objects MONOLOG, DIALOG and POLYLOG the formal and constructive potentials were demonstrated.

What is the Topic?

In a broader sense, the project deals with recycling under the use of contemporary technology with recourse to a primal handling of existing structures.

Why does it look like this?

The appearance of the three objects is mainly ruled by the forms of the disused structures (source structures). The developed process contains the translation of these source structures into digital Space using a 3D scanner in a first step. In the next step these scanned source structures will be compared to a predefined target structure. The best matching areas will then be cut from the source structures in an automated way. Finally, alle the single piece will be connected to form the resulting structure. The use of many individual pieces results in a character that is similar to assemblages. To improve the scanning process all structures were painted white. The monochromatic color scheme creates a visual unity of the diverse materials and colors.

What is special?

Conventional recycling processes use disused structures to produce secondary resources. Duroplasts and especially composites like fiberglass-reinforced plastics (GFRP) and coal fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRP) are very hard to recycle and are thereby chopped and used as filling material to build roads or as combustible material. Thereby all formal and constructive properties of the structures are list. To avoid such downcycling in my process the formal and constructive properties of the source structures are analyzed and are maintained mostly.

What is new?

Basically SECOND LIFE is not new, but an ancient idea. Indigenous people, that wouldn't have access to tools and machines, invested most of their time in searching for preformed structures like branch forks, straight sticks and fitting stones. My project is based on this concept and the time-consuming process of searching for the matching structures is done by a computer. Therefore the innovation lies within the combination of an ancient concept and contemporary technology to establish an automated process to reuse disused structures.