The analog-digital captures exercise requires a digital camera and your eyes. A person’s perception of a physical space comes from experience. Capturing images of space in everyday life forces you to examine your physical experience closely. The experiential quality of the analog space is collapsed into layers of information that present a flattened space. Space appears as a framed image: a literal, yet biased reference to the real. Design is the act of looking, isolating, emphasizing, framing, and freezing the real spatial experience. The site of investigation is a domestic refrigerator. Students are asked to photograph conditions of between, emphasizing intriguing spatial viewpoints: between inside and outside, between light and dark, between open and closed, between movable and static. Selected analog-digital capture prints (4 x 6 or 4 x 4 cards) are organized into logical themes or groupings as a six column by six row analog-digital array. A digital version of the array is reconstructed in Adobe Photoshop. .

Several of the analog-digital capture cards are arranged in unique analog-digital sequence strips. This exercise poses intriguing possibilities such as unusual spatial relationships, light, movement, moments of time, ironic twists, discovered rhythms, alignments, continuities, and other ideas of connectivity or overlap. Space and light is evaluated through careful observations and playful discoveries. The objective is to distill the most powerful spaces discovered within the original captures into an invented sequence. The “story” or “visual logic” of each image within the sequence is considered. Multiple combinations of the strips are photographed with a digital camera. Adjustments and crops are accomplished in Adobe Photoshop.

Using a variety of form•Z tools, students make a series of digital tracing diagrams that interpret the hidden underlying forces, geometries, and structures embedded in one of your sequence strips. The source image is examined in terms of: orthogonal schema, tension schema, and architectonic tracing. The architectonics of the sequence strip are developed by emphasizing and articulating the joints and connections of overlapping, interlocking or interpenetrating elements. The tracing diagrams are composited on the source images in wireframe display, exported as JPG images directly from form•Z. In this exercise, design is the dynamic tension between the digital marks you create in form•Z and the underlying image.

The digital relief is a transitional study between two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds. A digital relief model is constructed in form•Z, using combinations of the orthogonal, tension, and architectonic schemas. The relief model is built by selectively extruding three-dimensional objects from the flat two-dimensional surfaces into solids, voids, projections, depressions, positive, and negative spaces. The super relief consists of duplicated elements and freely arranged combinations of the digital reliefs. In this exercise, design is the interpretive arrangement and composition of sub-assemblies in three-dimensional space. Students exhibited: Dianze Wu, Leonardo Martinez, Megan Christian, Taylor Hanttula and Thao Le.

Lobotomy Machine by Dianze Wu: The process of the poetic experiment is not static, but a self-generating and evolving machine. Finding the tensions, architectonics and possibilities through the investigation can be defined as a lobotomy of the space. The conflicts between the functionalities of the portions creates the initial series of the machine, but the nexus between each machine is generated by the magnitudes of the process. Instead of tracing and repeating, the poetic concentrates on exploring the flexibility of the spaces. The impacts between the models and the process are the cue that the process will be endless.

Manufactured Preservation by Leonardo Martinez: As to the refrigerator; a box, a room, a cabinet – a spatial device for the use of preservation in a cooled state. The preservation of architectural space does not truly exist, but is instead manufactured through the sequential overlay of assemblies and captured in shadows by the underlying organization of mass and plane. Consequently, any given form of architectural space is then dissolved within a hostile atmosphere of doubt. Overlap establishes presence and not repetitiveness as the human eye may initially perceive. The presence is a necessity for the survival of space where it is not meant to be preserved.

Landscape of Deceit by Megan Christian: There is no truth. Every attempt at cognition is framed infinitely through other lenses that cannot be perceived. What we observe is our own projection of some imperceptible reality. We obscure truthful essence through surfaces and planes, objects and buildings – normative shapes that deny all sensitivities of the real bounds of energy within. These imperceptible energy systems are vastly mistaken for their tangible whole, and the subtle truths layered within – exchanging, ever-moving – become inconsequential compared to the formative lie. Interior energy creates and amplifies the derivative splendor seen on the exterior. The dynamics of invisible, in-between life are greater teachers than the models they appear as.

Evolving Parasite by Taylor Hanttula: The ever-changing angularity and curvature interact as a continual architectural engagement that exploits the imagination. A convoluted structure begins to form the depths of the unknown. Sharp angularity defines a trajectory towards the exploration of the infinite. The infinite line pierces through mass and space as an interruption to another. Each projection becomes an opportunity for the distortion of spaces that are resultants of the infinite line. Illusions from shadows, contrast, and translucency further extend the depth of projection. Developing in its own environment, the parasite structure grows from itself as an endless evolution.

Morphed by Thao Le: The engine is concerned with the lives it touches. Life produces a system in full force. No two systems are alike. The developed system is a city or society.The city or society is the product of pragmatic structure and circulation.Structure and circulation are made with the absence of the universe.The universe is fluid and volatile, creating an environment.The environment starts an engine.And the engine becomes possible because of the lives that are there.

What became the poetics media workshop, was first launched by Professor Neiman at the University of Colorado at Denver in spring 1988. form•Z was introduced as the preferred 3D tool in fall 1992, replacing Architrion II. Immediately the students could see amazing opportunities even though they and their instructor were limited in knowledge of this software. It took a while to figure out an effective pedagogy. From the beginning, once introduced to the basics, students were allowed to explore the software as deeply as they desired to accomplish their design intentions. Students tended to know more about the software then the instructor.

Many of the first exercises introduced in 1992 were marginally successful. Over the years these same exercises were re-examined, each time yielding better and better results. Classes taught at University of Colorado in Boulder in 1998-1999 took the pedagogy using form•Z to a new level. Between 2005 to 2009, at Texas Tech, the techniques and the work advanced to its highest level, resulting in several form•Z awards for students. Last fall’s class was a re-introduction to exercises introduced 10 years earlier.