Galen Koch: [0:00:01] I always do these interviews with people who are in the middle of a workshop. It’s just the way it is. So first, can you just tell me your name, who you are, and where you’re coming from?

Alfonso Parra Rubio: [0:00:12] My name is Alfonso Parra. I am a graduate student for the Center for Bits and Atoms [CBA] at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] under Neil Gershenfeld, which is organizing Haystack Labs, among a lot of other things. I’m originally from Spain. I came to the US in 2019 to join Neil’s group. That’s me without entering the research side of it.

GK: [0:00:45] Have you been at Haystack Labs before?

APR: [0:00:47] I came here two years ago when the first Haystack Lab was set and organized as [inaudible] casualty even, that was led through the pandemic. The pandemic made Haystack close, so there was this chance that the director back in the day would open for us as a lab to take over Haystack. The way I like to see it is that the first Haystack Lab, the second one, and the third one have been a success because Neil and all the Haystack people mingle – scientists, researchers – and artists. Researchers or scientists are very process-oriented people, but artists are very object-oriented people; of course, [there is] process, but the angle is much more the object. So, there’s a perfect conversation within these two types of people that makes Haystack Lab so fun.

GK: [0:01:57] Were you expecting that when you came that first year, or was it a surprise?

APR: [0:02:03] That was a surprise. We all came here not fully knowing what we were going to do and much more with a project in mind and with an execution plan of it. What we were not expecting were the synergies and the conversations that happened since the first dinner. That is it. Because I remember the first person that shocked me. A lot of people shocked me, but the first person that shocked me was Andreas Dezso, that she was here. When the new students start talking about our research or what is our research, she immediately starts putting her work into our processes and starts asking a thousand questions. That was the first spark that I was like, “Oh, this is a fun gathering.”

GK: [0:02:59] Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s very cool to have that perspective that you have of being here that first year.

APR: [0:03:06] Yeah. That first year was also extra nice because we just came out of the pandemic and just came here to this idyllic place. This key of American modernism was like, “Wow, this place is amazing.” The space itself really changed the way we work, I think. I can talk about how the CBA researcher people feel here. It is like we live the whole year in our lab, which is in an amazing space, but it’s a basement, right? We don’t have natural light in our basement. We have all the machines but no natural light. And then you come here, and there is light everywhere; you’re in the middle of the most beautiful nowhere on a cliff. It really changes the way you work – doesn’t fully know what time it is – you know what time it is because the bell rings, but it’s very easy to go up to two AM in the lab and be just like having a blast and not feeling tired.

GK: [0:04:09] Can you talk a little bit about how that’s influenced your work, that infusion of nature and being out?

APR: [0:04:19] Yeah, particularly when I came here the first time, I was much more focused on research and didn’t have much of an artistic intention or wanting to do more artistic pieces that don’t fully rely on what is academic paper whatsoever. Through the course of the years, thanks to MIT, we got the chance to get a grant to make an art collective that we named our own collective, and we made our first exhibit last year. So, it’s been very different between my first year at Haystack and this year at Haystack. In my first year, again, I had a project; I wanted to make some bio-composite and just play with [inaudible] that Neil came here the first year. But this year, I came with a friend with the intention of folding wood. Our collective is based on structural origami. We want to fold anything but paper. The exhibit we did back at MIT was folding metal, and I don’t think I should have brought metal to Haystack. This composite was like – Haystack is full of trees; we should try to go with the strategy of folding veneer or folding wood. It feels amazing because I don’t check my email here. I don’t check my phone. I just think about the pieces, and the way I think about days is like a countdown. Today is Tuesday, so I have two days, is what I think about days here. So, it’s like an immersive week.

GK: [0:05:57] That’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re working on more this year, the folding of the veneer and wood, and how machines factor into that?

APR: [0:06:17] As I explained previously, we are interested in folding every type of material, which is not paper, because folding is an incredible manufacturing process that encodes 3D shapes and 3D information in a 2D domain. The fact that when you talk about folding, [you] think about paper is something that – it’s because it’s the most accessible material; you can immediately fold and do stuff. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the best material to fold with a sculptural or engineering mindset or focus or goal. If you’re able to fold metal or any material that doesn’t like to form that much out of plane, you can have outstanding mechanical properties that help you to make massive pieces very easily. Very easily, I say, because one, 2D processes are incredibly faster than 3D processes, and the second one is because at the end of the day, if you think about a way, a method, in which you make less stiff your material or in certain areas as a crease, then you can drill or laser cut or whatever a crazy map, and then just like fold it up. Here, I [inaudible] with Klara Mundilova. I collaborate with her a lot. She’s the MIT master of curved creasing, and she developed a lot of mathematical processes. She’s the person that makes the dirty job of solving differential equations to make beautiful 3D shapes. And then we use – also, Klara and I have written also a couple of technical papers together as well. Here, we just took the week to think about the aesthetical part of our processes. We designed crease patterns, a lot of curve crease patterns, a lot of like [inaudible] crease patterns, and we fold veneer. We fold in two types of processes. If we want to make tiny pieces, we just take the veneer, and we laser cut the creasing maps, and then we just literally fold it because, with the laser cut, you can engrave, which is you’re not cutting through all the way the stock, so you’re just cutting a little bit the wood in such a way [that] when you fold it, the wood really just want to fold there. But that only allows us to make pieces in the range of like one meter, seven hundred millimeters more or less. If we want to go bigger, we use the same technique, which is we take the veneer and fold a concave and a convex pattern, but in the middle, we put linen with epoxy through a wet layer process. This is beautiful because we came up with the process here last month thinking about, “Oh, I’m going to Haystack. What should we do? Oh, I think this process is neat.” The process is the following: We make a sandwich of the crease pattern of the veneer with the linen flat. We put epoxy on, and we put a vacuum bag. We vacuum, and everything goes flat. But because we are doing origami, we fold that vacuum bag into the shape. We let the resin cure in that stage. We are folding while the resin is still viscous and curing and stays [folded] because that’s how origami works. And then, through the time, in a couple of hours, the resin will stiffen up. So we mold that vacuum bag, and that piece is already folded forever. Not only that, but it’s incredibly lightweight and super stiff, so we can make large-scale sculptures that way out of wood.

GK: [0:10:17] What are all of these processes that you’re working on here? What are the intentions for the future? Are they models for something that you want to do that is really large?

APR: [0:10:28] Yeah. We are assembling right now a two-meter sculpture. The intention of folding with these structural properties comes from an engineering and architectural application because it’s a beautiful way to build shell structures. Here, we are doing sculptural application, and also because it’s the language we talk. We fold stuff. [laughter] We don’t carve or mill. We like to build from 2D forms.

GK: [0:11:06] With folding – forgive me for not knowing this – these forms that you’re making are structurally sound from an engineering perspective?

APR: [0:11:19] Yeah, from a mathematical perspective.

GK: [0:11:21] Yeah, from a mathematical perspective.

APR: [0:11:22] There are many ways that you can make a mathematical model to achieve a target, to achieve a place. The paper we recently wrote was – you have two surfaces with double curvature, typical curvature, and we generate mathematical folded patterns that satisfy those boundaries, one-fold. We have the information of that folded structure in the folded state and in the flat state, such as we can manufacture flat. When we fold it up, we achieve any surface we want. There are many ways to achieve that folded structure. We are doing something slightly different, which is – you can fold a curve, and it’s called curve creasing. Then, the math there goes much deeper, gets a little bit more complex to solve, and there is a larger space of these analytic shapes. There’s a lot of artistic practice of that. Dave Hoffman was a pioneer – no, he wasn’t the pioneer, but was a huge reference point for any person that likes curve crease folding because he made such beautiful aesthetical pieces. He was a math professor at MIT. He never considered himself an artist, but he was a huge artist. If you’re curious, you can check all his pieces at the MIT archives, MIT museum archives. On the Internet, they have all of them. It’s just so simple, so beautiful.

GK: [0:13:08] That’s amazing. You’ve kind of transitioned from this art space, right? Would you call yourself an artist?

APR: [0:13:18] No, no. I like to fold stuff with an aesthetic application, but no, I don’t consider myself an artist. I am so lucky to be in an institution doing a piece that gave me grants to make a collective that is interested in expressing their work from an artistic perspective. But I am not an artist.

GK: [0:13:39] What do you think, for you, that line is? Why is it important to be around artists here at Haystack?

APR: [0:13:48] Yeah, I don’t know. You know what? This is interesting. This is something that there’s a cultural difference in Spain, I would say. In Spain, you will find that there is a kind of dogma in that people call you an artist, and other people tell you that you are an artist. Even Paco de Lucía, which is the main Spanish guitarist that has ever lived, says that he’s a guitar player. He never considered himself an artist. I like the way he embraced that word. He was like, “I mean, if some people want to tell me that I am an artist, okay, but in my mind, I’m a guitar player.” What is interesting here, being at Haystack with people that are artists, it’s that I feel like an artist is also the ultimate rabbit hole. [laughter] It’s a person that has built its own rabbit hole and has went so deep. If that person has went so deep and for so many years, it’s because something interesting is happening. So, just hanging out and chatting with them and seeing their work and seeing the narrative is very interesting, and it somehow has a parallelism with researching. We find a rabbit hole, and we go deeper and try to write a thesis and try to build a story about that, but we don’t have – our intention is not to make you feel something. The intention of a researcher is trying to make something that has academic value, but the researcher’s intention is the same path, but [the] intention is [to] make you feel something.

GK: [0:15:21] Yeah, that’s interesting. That “to feel something” is the distinction, maybe.

APR: [0:15:26] Exactly. Exactly. It has an impact of you rather than the research sometimes can have – I don’t want to say that it’s a more capitalistic way because, at the end of the day, you can have you can make also science without the capitalist intention. But let’s say that the only barrier and the difference I can find right now sitting on this chair would be like my intention with my Ph.D. research is not to make you feel something. If I made it, amazing, but it is not. [laughter]

GK: [0:16:07] That’s great. Is there anything, like a conversation or experience or something you’ve seen being made here, that has been inspiring for your work outside of the woodshop?

APR: [0:16:22] That is going to be – so I feel like here we are in a stage in which we are like drinking from a firehose, but we digest later. I’m pretty sure that these things came later came after – will come later once we’re back in our realities and we’re like, “Hey, like those moments when you are falling asleep, and you have your mind just like, fully thinking, “Dude, you will use this as an inspiration point for sure.” As we were talking previously, this place makes you feel so present here and so deep here that I’m not thinking about my thesis at all. That’s why I’m not –right now, I don’t feel that inspiration for my thesis because right now what is the most important thing is what is happening in the wood shop.

GK: [0:17:16] Did it have an effect the last time you were here?

APR: [0:17:21] The last time I was here, I was doing stuff less related with my research. It was more just let’s go there and help artists to make other objects with the skillset that researchers can have. We did end up doing some research that we tried later to implement in the lab, [but it] didn’t work. Definitely that was some feedback loop there for us. But I’m pretty sure that now this week, in which we’ve been folding as crazy people, will help me because I already had – I saw a couple of behaviors of some patterns. I was like, “I didn’t know about this tiny thing that I thought it was going to be a huge problem for me, but now I could solve.” So yeah, this year already I was not super aware, but maybe I already saw something. [laughter]

GK: [0:18:23] You said you’re going to be up really late. What’s your final outcome that you’re trying to get finished?

APR: [0:18:30] We are just assembling a two-meter inverted pyramid out of wood made out of these crudely assembled patches of oak. It’s a tedious process because all the pieces we’ve been doing here; it’s first time we’re doing it in this material, so you’re paying the price of the mistake of the first piece, which increases the time of your building twice, easily, or more. If I would need to build this tower again, it will take way less than half of the time because we’ve learned about things that we shouldn’t do with a composite here. So now we are manually fixing details and taking a lot of care to every piece, the mistake we’ve done. Most of those mistakes consist of removing material. [laughter] We’re going to be for sure up late to try to finish those two pieces.

GK: [0:19:34] That’s great. I wish you all the luck.

APR: [0:19:37] Thank you.

GK: [0:19:39] Is there anything that I didn’t ask you about the process or anything you want to say about Haystack Labs that we didn’t talk about?

APR: [0:19:48] No. I think the most interesting part is that concept of the mingle between object-oriented people and process-oriented people. [It] makes a lot of conversations that couldn’t happen in a place in which there’s only process-oriented people, as we are in academia. I’m pretty sure that the artist side on the research side greatly benefits [by] this mingling.

GK: [0:20:16] Yeah, it’s not always direct collaboration, but there’s a constant conversation happening.

APR: [0:20:26] Yeah, for sure. I would say there is constant collaboration. If you go to the ceramics studio, it’s been a collaboration since five days ago and not stopping. Klara and I are a little bit more isolated in our woodshop, but we are having a blast, [laughter] and we welcome anyone that comes to join us.

GK: [0:20:51] That’s great. Thank you so much, Alfonso.

APR: [0:20:55] Thanks to you.