Conducted by Viola Ago and Galo Canizares, inaugural recipients of the Christos Yessios Visiting Assistant Professorship, the Interferences Workshop I articulated the complementary, yet independent, research of emerging digital fabrication tools to be conducted by the two new faculty. At the end of the four-day workshop, two groups of Knowlton School students presented their experiments with coding and digital software with separate displays of digital or fabricated 3D models. 

“In general, our projects examined the new dimension of interactivity that comes with web development and interactive on-line models,” reflected Galo Canizares during the final-day presentation, which displayed his group’s digital work through an array of monitors.

Ago’s group presented 3D printed objects, with a selection vacuumed formed, that had either a geometric or mathematic sequence embedded in them. “Our final day of the workshop was focused on the conflation of graphic content and formal content and how technology like 3D printing, milling and vacuum forming can be agents in the process of forming flat and 2½D graphics onto a 3D form,” commented Ago.

During the faculty’s two-year residency, the Knowlton School will host workshops and public programs around Ago’s and Canizares’s specific research themes. Interferences, a project of projects conducted under the auspices of the Christos Yessios Professorship, refers to the various means through which these projects might weave, reframe, or disrupt contemporary modes of digital design.

Present for both the workshop introduction and final presentations was Knowlton School Faculty Emeritus Christos Yessios, whose endowed professorship will allow novel investigations of computation in architectural design. In his introductory remarks, Architecture Section Head Todd Gannon acknowledged Yessios’s development of the 3D modeling software form·Z as “an incredibly important part of the backstory of this school, and how this school found itself in the forefront of certain strands of digital investigation in architecture for over the past 30 years.”

Interferences Workshops II & III are scheduled for spring 2019, with the Interferences Exhibition planned for fall 2019 and a symposium slated for spring 2020.