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Plexes and Patches: Ambivalent Artifacts of Computer-Aided Design

Sat, September 2, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Beacon F

Abstract

Computation offers what we might term a procedural ontology to a range of disciplines from mathematics, where it originated, to other scientific and artistic fields where it has been ambivalently used both because of its associations to concrete technologies and as an epistemic template channeling generative, descriptive or analytical aspirations. Tracing early disclosures of this productive ambivalence, this paper will reflect on two artifacts from the history of Computer-Aided Design. The first is the “Plex,” a theoretical construct developed at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT by mathematician Douglas Ross in the 1950s, which helped steer early software projects and foreshadowed object orientation (OOP). Described as “an interweaved [sic] combination of parts in a structure” a Plex represented a thing “be it concrete or abstract, physical or conceptual.” The second is the “Coons patch,” the earliest mathematical technique for the calculation and display of curved surfaces on a computer created by Steve Coons, which demonstrated the formal possibilities of linking Computer-Aided Design and numerically controlled machinery, and was crucial to attract a generation of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to problems of computational design and geometry. Challenging abstract-concrete binaries, I will discuss these artifacts’ realization through a plurality of discursive and material practices involving diagrams, numerically-produced objects and geometries, writing and (crucially) software, suggesting their ambivalence as both operative artifacts and symbolic notations is a distinctive feature of computational objects.

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