Athos Bulcão's Tile Distribution Logic Using Common Digital Art

Introduction

Brasília is the capital of Brazil, an idealization project that had started more than 100 years before the first design draft. José Bonifácio de Andrada Silva suggested changing the capital to the country's interior and the city's name in 1823 to protect the capital from possible attacks by foreign forces. Surrounded by the prophecy of a Catholic saint called Dom Bosco that a promised land would emerge between the 15th and 20th parallels, precisely where Brasília was built, the city is, after all, a livid monument of modernism.

The project emerged during the 1050s in the government of the iconic president, Jucelino Kubitchek. The entire scheme was monumental, and the architect responsible for it was the renowned Oscar Niemeyer. The entire city was projected from scratch to become a garden city, and after more than 60 years of existence, a lot has changed. Gardens have grown more prominent, but many of their original designs coexist with the locals that sometimes cross those modern monuments without even knowing how it all had come to live.

In this everyday scenario, in the middle of the city park, a rest stop had an astonishing surface artwork by the artist Athos Bulcão, a friend of Oscar Niemeyer who became an official member of the Brasília construction team. A joggler can easily relax from his daily exercise, leaning on the wall without paying attention to the logical complexity of the composition formed by a series of black and white tiles where her body rests (Ribeiro & Perpétuo, 2008, p. 142).

Athos Bulcão tiles have interesting logic; each surface possesses its own intrinsic rules of distribution that were planned by the artist and mapped as groups of possible arrangements. In one of the archive's official pictures of Brasília's construction (Ribeiro & Perpétuo, 2008, p. 6), it is possible to see him holding an umbrella and explaining how to display his tiles to the constructors. He could not have supervised each of the works, and it is clear that he embraced chance due to accepting human error and the enormous space that some compositions occupy. Now, his work can be perceived as living and organic compositions, resulting in vivid structures of color where repetition seems absent, and logic has extensive but limited possible alternatives.

Those artworks' proximity to people's everyday lives can motivate local students to experiment with Athos Bulcão artwork. However, explaining the logic and making it into tile distribution is difficult; using paper prototypes helps, but Common Digital Art coding takes it a step further in the complexity of tiling art. Teaching students to develop their logic is even harder if they intend to create authorial tiling works in murals using digital technology. This chapter will describe how this process of paper prototyping, logic understanding, coding recreation and computer-assisted manufactured machines can help students overcome these difficulties.

Although this chapter will use Athos Bulcão's artwork in tile composition, the skills that will be demonstrated are from a broader understanding of using logic as material to compose dynamic and visual structures. Having an artist's work in the background exemplifies the processes adopted here. Because this chapter uses concrete real work as an example, examining historical sites and guiding diagrams to deconstruct them into coding is feasible. Still, navigating the observable legacy of Athos Bulcão artworks is a visualizing approach to reconstructing the thinking of modern architecture, design and art.

Finally, this chapter illustrates and explains how prototyping, digital coding, and manufactured crafting solve the process of experimentation and teaching such a complex form of art development in a classroom. Please access the online resources in references to view or reuse the codings used in this chapter directly.