Columbus, Ohio—Machinic phylum refers to the set of self-organizing processes in the universe. These include all processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements (organic and nonorganic) suddenly reach a critical point and begin to cooperate to form a higher-level entity. Recent advances in experimental mathematics have shown that the onset of any of these processes may be described by the same mathematical model. It is as if the principles that guide the self-assembly of these “machines”—for example chemical clocks, multicellular organisms, or nest-building insect colonies—are at some deep level essentially similar. The notion of a machinic phylum thus blurs the distinction between organic and nonorganic life.

A literal test bed for these conceptions was suggested by Jeff Kipnis, who in the project’s formative stages collaborated with us on a design for a water garden at his residence in suburban Columbus, Ohio. The project was then developed in two directions: Kipnis pursued the development of the garden in the earth/substrate as a series of linked pools, and our proposal developed the garden as a grooved laminar system in a concrete slab. In outline the garden consists of a furrowed-concrete slab measuring 7.3 by 21.9 meters (24 by 72 feet), containing a laminar system of twenty-four parallel grooves, each with a variable ogive cross section measuring an average of 45.7 centimeters (18 inches) from point to base. This material geometry constitutes the “primitive” through which a hierarchical series of global and local transformations—warps, dimples, folds—are expressed. Extreme and unstable configurations in the topology are essentially built into the concrete substrate in order to express them in the vital media (water, soil, plant materials, and chemical salts) of the “flow space” above.

The topology of the substrate induces transformational events that disrupt the evolution of the media flowing on it. In such topological manifolds, the characteristics of the mapped media are determined not by the quantitative substrate space below, but rather by the specific singularities of the flow space of which they are a part. This means that the “dead” yet intensive geometry of the grooves excites material and/or biological novelty in the media. In literal and instrumental fashion, multiform gradients in the geometry diagram and trigger the gradients of growth inherent in natural systems and yield a prodigious, if only partially manageable, field of blooms.

Principals: Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto

Collaborators: Jeffrey Kipnis and David Ruy