halokinesis

HALOKINESIS is an award-winning thesis project exploring environmental agency, elemental mediums, and evolutionary architecture. HALOKINESIS is an architectural endeavor that utilizes salt, a universal material, to re-balance coral colonies and locally eradicate coral bleaching within applicable locations. HALOKINESIS is the magical ability to move salt with one’s mind, and thus, this project explores salt crystallization’s phenomenology by harnessing this power within our reality.

Salt, an essential and abundant element on earth, is known for its ubiquitous flavoring and preservation, while also denoted as a sterilizing agent. However, salt remains a vital element of life. Salinity’s decreasing ocean density in relation to its paradoxical attributes of sustaining and annihilating situates itself as a priority in investigating its usefulness and applications.

Our elemental was focused on salt. Focusing our experimental manifestations around appropriation of the origins of salt production processes, both natural and artificial, we revealed this element as holding an inherent nature of super-temporal growth. This required us to elicit interventions through controlling behavioral propagation. As we further identified salt to be a keystone to the ecological processes of the world, we took into consideration the circulation and movement of salt bodies on earth (halokinesis). Our HALOKINESIS relied on time, coupled with a responsive scaffold, growing crystals to achieve strength and formations. Salt tectonics, halokinesis, and crystallization are typically referred to as existing within a geological time scale.

On the basis of research, we identified two different processes that would influence crystallization: solution-related and scaffold-related. Our controlled-variable approach led to the spicule scaffold, which outperformed all other scaffold types as spicules entangled with each other, forming robust structures.

In the 'unlimited solution’ of the ocean, salt is in superabundance, becoming the site for HALOKINESIS. By designing and embedding intelligent systems, our goal was to create a system that receives environmental data to determine agent behavioral patterns, adapting to external forces from the continuous and substantial environmental variability. Following the information flow, a structure would be generated by the swarming behavior that constantly interacts with local organisms and terrain.

By implementing a cyclical system of crystallized agents that rehabilitate coral reefs through the introduction of higher salinity levels, HALOKINESIS gives agency to the scaffold in order to determine ideal formations.