David Ruy of the firm Ruy Klein discusses their unrealized 2007 Knot Garden project for P.S. 1 in terms of the new terrain of the technological sublime. The application of macramé and nautical knotting required Ruy and his partner Karel Klein to devise novel means of modeling, rendering and scripting.
Ruy critiques the ubiquitous discourse of networks and fields in architecture as a rejection of the object. Ruy characterizes this as a position that weakens architecture, that relies on ill-founded attitudes about nature, the environment and human interaction. He opposes this kind of systems thinking with the philosopher Graham Harmon, who argues that things are more than the sum of their relationships.
Ruy discusses his Rorschach-influenced projects, and Klex 1 and 4 for the 2008 Matters of Sensation exhibit in terms of an impersonal methodology generating forms that prompt diverse responses. He frames a discussion of the Bioprinting synthentic skin experiments, collaborating with biologists at Gen Space in Brooklyn, with the story of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose donated tumor cells after her death in 1951 remain in use in labs throughout the world.
