Every year the Arirang Mass Games held in Pyongyang, North Korea,
organises an impressive spectacle of perfectly choreographed dancing
and gymnastics in what might be the most incredible example of
human coordination in the world. Every 20 seconds, for a period of
two hours,
a
human mosaic composed of thousands of people switches
the panels of coloured flip books to create pixellated images honouring
the country’s cultural heritage and political regime. In the words of
photojournalist Jeremy Hunter, a crowd-driven display of this magnitude
‘could only be achieved in a place where you have an unlimited resource
of humans who do whatever they are directed to do. Every breath of
these people is coordinated.’1 Despite its tyrannical undertone, such
a
display encapsulates a stunning example of coordinated human workers
collaborating to assemble an emergent large-scale form.
An Assembly Problem
Though design software and digital fabrication tools have had a
transformative effect on how we make things, their utility
is
still severely
limited when it comes to the assembly of large-scale forms. Traditionally,
information and logic flow unidirectionally and without human
intervention from computers to tethered fabrication devices through
programmatic instruction sequences such as G-code. For large-scale ...
