Her work explores putting porous boundaries between things at various scales and materiality. She is currently exploring sticky and stinky themes of comfort, air conditionoing, and sweat while working on a collaborative world building project, temporarily titled “surreal suburb” through a design collective, Unihoro Supply.
She is currently interested in digital/physical interaces, autonomous vehicles, and the future of digital infrastructures.
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- living skin eats the toxic skin
- Site: (40.22,-73.99)
- Project timeline: 2021-
- Author: Ahzin Nam
Modern history attempted to secure the comfort of predictability against nature through layers of chemical and synthetic building materials. With chemical contaminants entering bloodstreams, lead poisoning caused by domestic surfaces became an epidemic that have most affected lower income occupants of under-maintained buildings. Often requiring methods of complete displacements of the occupants and labor intensive methods that require melting and stripping down surfaces, Hyper-contaminated home is a proposal to create a living fungal mycelium plug in system to sequester heavy metal ions from lead contaminated surfaces.
I. Rotten home:
Contrary to the narratives of novel myco-materials, we are already living with fungi, in a dynamic closer to the fungal zombie. They live on walls, in walls, on us, and in us. The black spots against the white walls, the territorial marks of black molds, become the visual sign of health hazard, making the image of a rotten home. Alien organisms and the forces of wind and water expose the skeleton, decay the skin, and parasitically grow on cellulosic structures. Pests and unknown illnesses loom in the dark and damp spaces. The precarity and unpredictability made a rotten home a space that is no longer safe for us.
II. The Collapsed History of Chemically Contaminated Home:
The “off-the-shelves” materials in neat packaging guaranteed the homeowners water, fire, insects, mold, air-proof homes. The wall no longer became a sheet of wood or a stack of stones. Between the outer surface and the inner freshly painted white surface, we now have layers of plastic insulation, vapor barriers, fungicide-treated wood, fiber-glass, dry wall, primer, and paint. Here, we encounter the collapsed history of a new contaminated home.
III. Hypercontaminated Home:
Before we haphazardly transfer the toxicity around us from our homes to landfills, soil, water, and back to our blood, we need a new approach to peeling off the toxic skin. And for the process, we must revisit the organisms that we were planning to scrub, melt, and kill off in the first place. As the previous arrays of petri dish (Section B) shows, our buildings are already composed of organisms.
Mycelium sequester lead ions during their growth by binding lead ion to their body and removing the toxins from their immediate environments. A variety of species of fungi, such as Pleurotus, Aspergillus, Trichoderma have proven to be effective in the removal of heavy metal in marine environment, wastewater, and on land. The mycoremediation process has been used along the horizontal plane in or above the ground level, but we could reimagine the process of vertically rotating the plane of remediation, curing the toxic skin of the buildings that we occupy.
- Street furniture for food couriers in NYC
- Site: (40.72,-73.98)
- Project timeline: 2022-2032
- Authors: Ahzin Nam + Annabella Chen + Scarlett Chen
Between densely packed and increasingly luxurious edifices, food delivery workers navigate their ways in and out, carrying lunches, dinners, snacks, groceries, and desserts of the city. Despite the food delivery market having doubled in the US since the beginning of the pandemic and privately owned outdoor structures stretch onto previously car dominated roads, infrastructure for app-based food couriers is underaddressed on streets.
The project proposed street-furniture prototypes designed for the safety and comfort of food delivery workers, using dimesions of bikes and bags of the workers as constraints. Digital fabrications and kit apart assemblies were used to produce prototypes that can be easily designed, assembled, and deployed on sites by local communities.
The project was CNC milled and assembled in 1:1 scale.
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Occupying empty lots as emergency housings during pandemic
- Site: (40.77,-73.97)
- Project timeline: 2019 - 2019 + 100 ma
- Author: Ahzin Nam
Studies have estimated the probability of novel disease outbreaks will increase three-fold in the next few decades based on the increasing rate at which novel pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 have broken loose human populations in the past 50 years.The density of cities leaves the vulnerable population - the elderly, disabled, chronic patients, and single parents - at larger risks of [ X ] novel pathogens. The project imagines methods of promptly occupying empty lots of high density metropolises with prefabricated modules that can be stacked onsite as temporary “evacuative” structures.
The living blocks are manufactured off-site and gets slotted into the shelves on-site.
- IRL Google Pins
- Site: (##,##)
- Project timeline: 2022-2050
- Authors: Ahzin Nam + Annabella Chen + Sanjana Lahiri
With digital map services, we constantly gavitate toward digital red pins on our phone screens. Closing the gap between the pin on a flattened plan and the streets that we walk on, Pinning is a project to create interactive 3d pins that allow the user to insert a new pin on a map by inflating a pin on a new location while allowing the “digital pins” to become a part of the physical world that we occupy.
- Realtime Parallel Universe
- Site: (40.22,-73.99)
- Project timeline: 2021-2027
- Authors: Ahzin Nam + Leon Fang + Ravindra Bisram
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice discovers a world that operates with the logic of Chess. The project creates a real-time parallel universe narration of the subject’s everyday life using machine vision to detect “actants” and use the text list of the actants as an input for Natural Language Processing to generate a longer real-time fiction. In the process, the biases embedded within a digital camera, machine vision (YOLO) and natural language processing (GPT-2) create a “familiarly strange” world that is constantly modified by and rewriting the real world.
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Merch Booth as a big lamp
- Site: (40.43,-73.50)
- Project timeline: 2023
- Author: Food Architect
- (Dong Ping Wong + Ashely Kuo + Katty Cybulski + Ahzin Nam)
Commissioned by 88Nightmarket, the official merchandise store of 88Rising, the pop up store at Head in the Clouds festival reinterprets merch booths as a festive market like experience for visitors to dance, take pictures, and continue the festival experience while in the queue. The structure, using scaffoldings that are typically spotted in streets of the city, glows up at night, creating an image of a glowing lantern.
(photo credit: Dong Ping Wong)