CAMIT Grant Recipient 2020
Material misfits in the uncanny space of the inexact
About the Project
Misalignments resists the urge to optimize, orthogonalize, mathematize, and discipline matter. Devising new hybrid ceramic fabrication processes, in this project M.Arch graduates Dalma Földesi and Jung In Seo broaden the definition of the exact and the “within tolerance.”
Földesi and Seo test the limits of shaping clay—the reliability of material control by hands, by machines, and by the interaction of the two. The qualities and capacities of their materials emerge from a balancing act between geometric specification and physical behavior. The designers orchestrate moments of instability by crafting an open score that allows different manifestations. This process reintroduces authorship and foregrounds labor in an otherwise increasingly automated process.
To produce the objects of Misalignments, Seo and Földesi developed a robotic clay extrusion process and carried out various clay building experiments, exploring the influence of human control in the robotic loop.
Schedule
Misalignments online exhibition
Opening September 3, 2020 / 8:45pm
Wiesner Student Art Gallery
Part of Arts on the Radar 2020
Wiesner Gallery Talk: Misalignments with Dalma Földesi and Jung In Seo
November 17, 2020 / 6pm
Join Dalma Földesi and Jung In Seo (M.Arch ’20) for a gallery tour and conversation about Misalignments, their exhibition in the online Wiesner Student Art Gallery. The artist-architects have created an enticing series of gallery rooms, each illuminating a different aspect of their robotically-fabricated ceramics. Strikingly beautiful and conceptually rigorous, Földesi and Seo’s vessels and forms are created with clay extruding and carving mechanisms of their own design. Join us for a gallery tour and Q&A session with the artists as we consider the tension between hand and machine, the controlled and the accidental. Hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT.
About the Artists
Jung In Seo and Dalma Földesi are 2020 graduates of MIT’s Master of Architecture program. They are interested in the creative re-evaluation of design tools (their objectives and their limitations), and their alternative applications. They have collaborated on projects including interactive installations, sculpture, furniture design, and large-scale structural analysis and fabrication. Their work celebrates the liminal space between the digital and the material: whether in pixels, grains, vectors, or fibers, they seek opportunities in the misalignments between techniques, resources, and desires.
“Dalma and Jung are making a novel contribution both to the theoretical discourse in architecture at the borderline between design and fabrication and explore new aesthetic territory through the production of their physical clay artifact.”
-Mariana Ibanez, Associate Professor of Architecture
Visit the artists’ website: DA–NG