Founded by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, Aranda\Lasch is a studio based in Tucson and New York City. Aranda\Lasch makes buildings, installations, and objects that explore the generative potential in physical things. I had the opportunity to learn more about their studio practice in anticipation of their upcoming Art Blocks project Primitives.

Jeff Davis: Hello! It’s great to meet you both. How did Aranda\Lasch get started?

Aranda\Lasch: The studio was formed in the early 2000s to explore algorithmic systems, initially to make sense of the world around us and then to make things within it. Our first project was a video documenting pigeons in Brooklyn where we strapped small cameras onto birds to see the city from their point of view. Flocking is a classic model of decentralization. We were attempting to challenge the emerging dominance of satellite technology with an interspecies mapping of the city, getting off the grid so to speak. During our experiments, we became very interested in the pronounced differences between the real-world behavior of bird flocks and flocking simulations using agent-based algorithms. Why are the real flocks not as orderly as the simulated ones, what accounts for that? They’re alive, obviously, and they are motivated by things, like fear and hunger, that fall beyond the bounds of Craig Reynolds’ elegantly written Boids algorithm. We learned early on that algorithms are provisional, imperfect, and highly authored. This space of difference between generative models and the complex material world they aspire to seemed like a space rich with possibility and became the focus of our practice.

JD: Your first project jumped right into algorithms, how has your generative practice developed from there?

AL: As we began to make things—initially small-scaled objects and installations but eventually larger spaces and buildings—we wanted to make them in a way that challenged our ingrained biases and offered us the possibility of surprise. Algorithms provided us a way to do this by introducing into the process a system, procedure or logic embedded with its own decision-making capabilities, something often referred to as autonomy. Furthermore, algorithms could be encapsulated into code, shared easily, and translated into various tools for making. As a result, they dismantle traditional notions of authorship, frustrate the idea of a single author, and invite speculation on the shared nature of creativity. We have always regarded our work to be a collaboration between each other, those who share with us, and those who inspire us. An example of this is our 2008 project, Rules of Six, which was installed at The Museum of Modern Art, New York as part of the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition, curated by Paola Antonelli. The title, and the work, were inspired by Wilson Bentley, a photographer and the first person to prove, empirically through thousands of photographs, that all snowflakes have six sides but no two are exactly alike. His exhaustive work led Bentley to ask: “What magic is there in the rule of six that compels the snowflake to conform so rigidly to its laws?” That question stuck with us because it encapsulates a yearning for the algorithmic. The rule of six is evidenced not only in the fact that all snowflakes are six-sided but right down to the molecules and the way they bond with each other. Rules of Six is our attempt to pick up the story where Bentley left off, using contemporary Javascript, CA algorithms, and material science to explore the potential of simple rules for growth.

JD: How did you discover NFTs and crypto art?

AL: Our studio has been inspired by generations of artists doing work that can be seen as proto-generative. From artists like Sol Lewitt and Agnes Martin, photographers like Bernd & Hilla Becher, sound artists like John Cage and Iannis Xenakis—these are artists who break down the nature of authorship through process-driven tools and conceptual methods like serial production, coding, and self-organization. It’s more interesting to us to ask, not how we discovered NFTs/crypto but instead, how did NFTs/crypto discover art? Looking back at history reveals a deep connection between notions of dismantling authorship in art and the current technologies of decentralization which strive to dismantle the consolidation of power. In the last couple of years, on the cusp of our third decade of practice, we have watched with awe and delight a renaissance in generative work as it’s adopted by an entirely new generation around blockchain technologies. The current wave of decentralization, as manifested through cryptocurrency and NFTs, offers a genuine challenge to an increasingly consolidated and controlled internet with one that is more open and transparent. Whether that narrative holds over time, we do believe the societal impact of technology currently is untenable and demands alternative models that address the obvious calamities of big tech: algorithmic bias, gross inequity, and surveillance capitalism. If artists can help with proposing new models, we’re on board.

JD: Could you speak a bit about your studio’s approach to exploring algorithmic processes as they relate to the natural and physical world?

AL: The beauty of making three-dimensional, large-scale physical things is that, in the process, the story of the algorithm gets very complicated. Over time, we abandoned any hubris that what we were doing with computers was in any way novel and instead focused on how these technologies have deep histories going back millennia, resonating with craft, non-western culture, and physical matter in ways that seem unrelated to their technological origin. As a result, over two decades we have crafted a sensibility that welcomes the unexpected, and the contradictions and anachronisms that arise between procedural thinking and its material result. For instance, we’ve worked for sixteen years with native basket weavers from the Tohono O’odham nation in Southern Arizona to understand how something like weaving is both a generative practice and a material tradition rooted in a Native culture. We’ve learned how it respects local materials and expresses the landscape and an indigenous way of life. This Primitives project we are launching on Art Blocks is an extension of our long research into quasicrystals, which represent a fascinating story in science about the unexpected aberrations of the material world. We talked earlier about pigeons and how our fascination with flocks in Brooklyn started us on this path. As time moves on, we realize that when generative processes become material, they reveal the cultural histories with which they are intertwined.

JD: Yes, I think discovering frameworks that seem to underpin nature or humanity is really interesting. Any other recent projects you’d like to share?

AL: Last spring, at Volume Gallery in Chicago, we installed another iteration of our ongoing collaboration with Terrol Dew Johnson, a Native artist, activist, and weaver. The work represents an evolution of a sixteen-year creative exchange of making baskets. We’re most pleased with the fact that, after all this time together, we are still making work that surprises us and continues to reinvigorate our practice as a whole. As a testament to this work, pieces from this new collection were acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago and are currently on display there. The acquisition by the Art Institute comes about six years after the MoMA acquired a selection of pieces from our first basket show in 2006. We’re proud that our work provides platforms for these kinds of unexpected, persistent collaborations and means of communication and sharing. As we enter this new art space, we are enthusiastic for what the blockchain is bringing to this conversation and the way in which it will continue to enable new forms of artistic creation, sharing, and collaboration.

JD: Alright, I’d love to chat more about Primitives! You mentioned quasicrystals, could you speak more about your inspirations for the project?

AL: Two sources from the worlds of art and science inspired the project’s outcome: Albrecht Dürer’s engravings and the phenomena of quasicrystals. Together, they create an anachronism by using a centuries-old technique to represent a contemporary improbable material. Albrecht Dürer and his masterpiece Melencholia I (1514) inspired us to dive deep into the process of engraving reinterpreted through the medium of code. Eight Dürer hatches were developed for Primitives. Dürer not only perfected a new medium but invented an early imaging technology. By scratching metal away from a plate, an inversion of conventional drawing, engraving allowed a work of art to be reproduced and disseminated widely. For the blockchain, a new kind of dissemination, we developed a Dürer 3-bit shader (2³ = 8 values); the anachronism of the engravers trade translated into pure 1’s and 0’s. Primitives is structurally based on the science of quasicrystals. Unlike a regular crystal, whose molecular pattern is periodic (or repetitive in all directions), the distinctive quality of a quasicrystal is that its structural pattern never repeats the same way twice. It is ordered but aperiodic. Endless and uneven, quasicrystals can be described by the precise arrangement of a single modular part. As these small units aggregate together they form larger figures that themselves combine into ever larger movements, always a little bit different from any other. In this sense, quasicrystalline patterns have an infinite capacity to create and carry information. For more information about quasicrystals read our article, Ragged Edges.

JD: What else should collectors look for in your project as the series is revealed?

AL: The NFT is 3D. While its appearance as an engraving seems two dimensional, by rotating the Primitives its three-dimensional form is revealed. Download the object file and explore outputting it as a 3D print or any other fabrication method.

We look forward to seeing how the feature set plays out over its run. Without giving anything away, we can say that the features will probe the unique properties of the Primitives crystalline growth, their fractal depth and lattices. We looked closely at the process of engraving to inform the variability in representation, from different inked backgrounds to paper colors. There will even be incomplete and fragmented drawings which were inspired from Dürer’s sketches. Overall, the feature set is rigorously designed to balance variety and uniqueness with conceptual aims.

JD: Yes, I’m really looking forward to seeing all the iterations. Anything else you’d like to share to help people better understand your art?

AL: Over the years we’ve written two books that capture something of the evolution of our work. In Tooling, from 2006, one can see us work through the initial insights and discoveries made in the Brooklyn Pigeon Project as we developed our use and misuse of generative material processes into strategies for design, through a collection or our early projects and installations. A subsequent book entitled Trace Elements, published in 2017, presents the previous decade of the studio’s work as the insights described in Tooling were developed through projects that were increasingly substantial, built and enmeshed within wider cultural and historical contexts. In scale, the work in Trace Elements ranges from objects and furniture, to public art, buildings and urban spaces so that what is built, drawn, and projected gives human measure to procedural thinking. Along the way it depicts a practice that is committed to interdisciplinary work and extended collaborations in the way we’ve been talking about it here.

JD: Thank you, it’s been great to learn more about your practice! What’s the best way for people to stay updated with your work?

AL: Online, one can check out our website at ArandaLasch.com, where we have a section dedicated to generative work, experiments and work in progress. We also maintain social media through Instagram and Twitter, findable through our name.