Transformation was our project that joined the products of green chemistry, plaster, sculpture, and design. It was a relational aesthetics make festival where each sculpture became a word. It was a week of groups of people making objects using aesthetic ideas about community, language and form. There were images and reference which were our starting point, including Chinese Scholar’s rocks, Bakongo sculptures, and Joseph Beuys’ idea of social sculpture upgraded in the new century as relational aesthetics. In this sense we experienced the vagaries of different cultures: design and art; German and American; art and recycling. It was social, interactive, and creative. There was an infectious aspect of the project as we created a large, multi-authored, sculptural text exhibited at Gürzenichstraße in the old city of Köln.

There are two important subtitles to the project. The first reflects the idea of transformation: from trash to plaster to artist to art (Mull Zu Gips Zu Kunstlern Zu Kunst). It states a formula for the next level of transformation of this material. It is important to note that this wasn’t simply about a physical material. The other aspect at play is the the experience of each of the participants. They were transformed, if only just a bit, by the process of creating this work. Each had their own relationship to what they made, what others made, and how it came together in a larger sculpture. I began to see this project as a large organizational structure that created a relational ground between the participants. Everyone perceived the event each from their own perspective. It was like a city or an architecture using all of the complex ways that people might enter and exit and inhabit the space.

The second subtitle was Each Sculpture is a Word. When we came to Gerzinichstrasse where the sculpture was exhibited, the pattern of the cobble stones was so clear, it seemed like the lines of a text, a grand palimpsest of the things that had happened there and continue to happen in that place. If you visited the students while they made their work, speaking to one another, sharing values, listening to music and to lectures while they worked. They shared their likes and dislikes, their lives and concerns. They compared and laughed and invented language as they looked at the objects that were made and tried to make sense of them. Language flowed in through and around all that we did. It was creative language, playful in all respects.

The activity of the students, these disparate references and influences tie into my own work, particularly my work with the Sculptural User Interface. This is a program that uses computers and software to create an interactive experience that is virtual and can be physical. I use this program by typing into it. Each letter is mapped to a 3D virtual object, part of an alphabet. Words, and then sentences are created as a coded sculptural object. As words are typed, sculptural object grows on the screen. It can be navigated, manipulated and output to be made with rapid prototyping machines or CNC mills.

Another aspect of the Sculptural User Interface is the creation of alphabets. People can use easily available 3D software to create alphabets for the program. Once an alphabet is created it can be called into the program and used to create unique text objects. In workshops, People have learned how to do this easily, in less than a day, and created their own SUI alphabets in a kind of open source creative environment.

One can see how this is analogous to our project Transformation. In Transformation every object was a word, a subset of a larger content. In the SUI the same is true except that it begins at a more basic level, every object is letter: The letters join together to words: The words are joined together in large text objects, conglomerations of the choices of the artist as they type form into existence. Under the aegis of AVG and as the author of this environment we set up a structure within which people come together, are inspired by the ideas that were present and respond in a conversation of making. Their response was required to be a sculptural object, a plaster sculpture or work of design. There was a rhythm, an electricty a connection. It was almost as musicians jamming together in form, through making, in action. It was a marvel to participate.

Michael Rees