Welcome and Introduction by Heidi Reitmaier
Welcome to the symposium Tool Versus Medium – The Use of Rapid Prototyping in
Contemporary Sculpture. Leila Galloway has asked me to chair today’s events. I am
possibly the ‘layest’ person here in terms of rapid prototyping and I have been talking to
Annie Cattrell about the technique – what it is, what it entails, what it might be – and
subsequently I have come to see it as a process involving the removal of things. It
seems to stress the chain of production – this idea of the transformation of the concept
to the object, things being removed, taken out or limited and then asking what is left or
what that results in. This notion of the chain of production, which I am sure we will
discuss in more detail, poses some very obvious questions. There is a shift or, can I be
so bold to say, transformation in this creative process.
In terms of these major technical changes and shifts in the artistic process, there is also
the question of what these mean for the artist and whether his or her role has been
changed. There are various obvious questions about the artist, which I am sure will
come up today, concerned with authorship, authenticity, expression and, as Christiane
Paul points out in her work, ‘the agency of the artist’. I am sure we will discover things
about the radical transformation in terms of quality of physicality: what is this object that
results beyond the process and thinking about the end product; how has the object
changed and how will it change; what are the aesthetic implications of such technical
shifts; will we be seeing new forms that we never imagined, and might there be many
more modes of considering beauty; are we pushing boundaries we haven’t thought
about? Having spoken with Annie about verisimilitude, I have been thinking about these
implications for the meaning of truth.
So far I have talked about the object, but there is also the notion of the virtual, the virtual
implications, to be considered: are we translating our world in unimaginable ways and,
when we begin to do that, the boundaries between the real and the imaginary – in terms
of both the physical and the philosophical as well as the psycho-analytical – are up for
discussion. They are particularly unique to this moment so what we believe and
understand to be real is extremely new and challenging and the experience of that real is
potentially very new. We are going to have many examples today of business and the
arts coming together, especially as technology has become more sophisticated and
artists continue to be as receptive as ever. This, though, is key: businesses recognise
the breadth of creativity and talent pool in the art world, so I am not suggesting the
artistic and commercial worlds have been sworn enemies, but perhaps there is now a
new and growing climate of mutual respect to do with development and innovation more
than with marketing and money. And I say this from the Tate’s position, where business
is often about marketing and money. From this I began to think about moving out and
beyond the making of a piece and returned to the idea of experience and being
positioned where I am – as a spectator. Someone who looks and sees. What might rapid
prototyping do, change, or transform for the viewer? We have touched on the aesthetic
and touched on the idea of the virtual, but all these factors (along with many more that
will become apparent throughout the day) could shift not only the author’s relationship to
the viewer, but the viewer’s relationship to the object, as well as the viewer’s relationship
to the author. In this new, perhaps unprecedented, revolution – and I use a dramatic
phrase, but one that touches perhaps on the enormity of what we are talking about today
– how will we be affected as viewers? What is the impact for us? I spoke earlier about
the transformation of the creative process and we are exploring here today all these
elements that will open new thoughts on the creative artist, creativity and the audience.
David Wimpenny
I see the arts community following the same line of development as the manufacturing
and engineering sectors have taken over the past twenty years, using electronic forms of
production rather than manual, craft-based techniques. Many of these new methods
originate in the automotive industry. Manufacturing industry is concerned with converting
ideas into objects and this is equally applicable in Fine Art.
Rapid prototyping is all about manufacturing components in layers, depositing material
precisely where it is required rather than, for example, forming an object from a block of
material by machining. One thing that should be emphasised is it is an automated
process, so you don’t have to be skilled manually to manufacture objects.
In the stereolithography process there is a vat of resin and a laser that generates the
objects in layers, allowing the manufacture of very complex items. When manufacturing
in layers, complexity is not an issue. It is one of the mainstays of the prototyping industry
and also the primary technique used in prototyping within the arts. Another process is
laminated object manufacturing, again manufacturing parts in layers but this time by
bonding together sheets of material that are then cut with a laser to form the object. It is
an excellent process for making solid, chunky objects. Another process, I believe quite
popular with Keith Brown, is fused deposition modelling. A filament of polymer is
extruded through a heated nozzle to form the object, and it may be used to produce
complex plastic items. One thing you will notice is material underneath the object you
want; the reason for this is that any overhanging structures have to be supported. This
isn’t the case with all techniques, but is required for certain methods where you have
integral support generated by the process.
With laser sintering there is a chamber with a powder inside. The laser fuses the powder
by heating selectively and melting the powder. One of the major advantages of laser
sintering is the range of materials that can be processed – a wide range of polymers,
ceramics and metals – so again, in terms of creativity, it opens up a whole spectrum of
opportunity. An engineering example, very easy to come by, is a nylon plug used in the
automotive industry. It is a functional item, so if you want a rigid or functional object this
is a good technique.
Most of the techniques I have discussed so far are based on lasers, but printing is
coming into its own. It offers a wide range of alternative rapid-prototyping methods. In
one particular technique, of three-dimensional printing developed by MIT, a layer of
powder is deposited and a binder is inkjet printed onto the powder where the cross-
section of the component is required. Once the cross-section is finished, that component
drops down and another layer is applied on top so you finally get the object you want.
There could be, perhaps, one thousand layers of material. The reason this particular
technique might be of interest within the arts community is that it is cheap and can
produce complex items without the need to generate supports. Another major factor is,
because it is based on printing, coloured objects can be printed, for example a relief map
of the world giving both colour and geometry in the same model – something that could
be of interest to sculptors.
Another printing-based technique which might be of interest within the arts community is
based on printing the component directly using a wax material. In this process two
materials are printed, a standard wax and a water-soluble material. The advantage of
this process is very intricate items can be produced; it is used widely in the jewellery
industry. Again it is a process limited in scale and perhaps not appropriate for every form
of the arts.
To summarise the benefits of rapid prototyping, it is relatively fast and cheap. We have
to bring cost into this because it is a factor and ultimately someone has to pay. Complex
models can be produced and, in terms of engineering information, it is driven directly
from CAD [computer-aided design] data – there is no loss of integrity of the original
design ideas and nothing is lost in the process.
There are many applications for rapid-prototype models and although some are not used
directly within the arts, they could be applied in the future. These technologies were
developed originally for product-design applications. When you have something as
complex as a gearbox from Chrysler, it is difficult for engineers to comprehend
completely the design, but it shows highly complex items many be produced using these
techniques. We (the Rapid Prototyping Group at De Montfort) have been involved in a
number of programmes with artists, including Anthony Pagett who made one of the
many millennium sculptures and used a wide range of rapid-prototyping techniques in its
creation.
Something not used in the arts at the moment as far as I know, but perhaps of interest,
is the link with medical scanning. We can take data from CT [computed axial
tomography] and MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] scan data and generate models
from it. Obviously very complex models that replicate hard and soft tissue accurately
within the human body can be applied to other forms of objects. Most people like art to
have some permanence, and converting rapid-prototype models into metal objects is
obviously one route to produce something lasting. We can manufacture models and
convert them readily into investment castings and that is something perhaps not used by
artists as much as it should be.
I believe the future for both manufacturing and the arts is the direct manufacture of what
you want: the end product. With laser sintering we can generate metal parts in very
exotic materials by combining materials within one component. This is another thing to
consider for the future. A further advantage is in the accuracy of things sculptors want to
make.
Unfortunately there is one major drawback behind all this. To use rapid prototyping, you
need CAD and it is a change from normal ways of working. This said, a number of artists
have made the transition and projects from one commercial CAD company range from
the largest Buddha in the world to various replicas of medieval artefacts and even ice
sculptures. One project I was involved with saw the Tate Gallery sponsoring Tony Cragg
to develop rather strange garden tools for sale in Homebase. I don’t think they sold
especially well but it was a nice attempt at giving art to the masses.
There are benefits from CAD – obviously rapid-prototyping and machining techniques
can be used but, unlike traditional methods of forming sculptures, the design can be
manipulated and objects cut and merged. Objects may be scaled and textures applied to
the surface with a click of a button. The design generated may be saved, mistakes
undone and work archived securely for the future. Data may be shared and transferred
and that opens opportunities for simultaneous global exhibitions.
CAD is not the ideal medium for everybody and one way of getting round this problem is
to use a haptic design device which allows you to sculpt a virtual object you can feel.
Using an articulated arm, a virtual block of clay may be manipulated and carved until you
have the desired object. It is a perfect technique for non-prismatic, non-engineering
components.
Many artists will want to generate a 3D object with some permanence, but perhaps there
are alternatives, for example generating virtual-reality exhibitions where the objects don’t
really exist but give the impression to the audience of a real object. Through haptic
devices you can gain a sense of touch, animate objects, transform them, illuminate them
and combine them with other forms of art, for example music and the performing arts.
Another option is for data to be brought into the electronic-design environment from real
objects. For example, we can capture data from hand-crafted objects and from natural
products; potentially we can also copy elements of other people’s designs by reverse
engineering. A typical project we would get involved in would be capturing and archiving
data from complex porcelain figurines for companies like Royal Worcester.
Although we are talking about rapid prototyping within contemporary sculpture, it would
be fair to say rapid prototyping is not the total solution and does have certain limitations.
In some cases I would suggest high-speed machining as a better alternative to rapid
prototyping, particularly for large models with very solid cross-sections; it does allow the
potential for a wide range of alternative materials.
So why use rapid prototyping in sculpture? It helps develop ideas. If an artist has an
important commission and wants to work with customers, it is possible to make
prototypes. This is how the engineering industry works: rapid prototyping helps
communicates ideas to clients and helps check certain features. Some of the objects to
be presented at this symposium are complex, so visualisation of them during the
creative process can be challenging. Rapid prototyping allows an artist to focus on the
creative process and not think ‘how am I going to make it?’ or ‘can I make it?’ It provides
a new medium and that is always a stimulus for new ideas. It removes some of the
limitations artists might have personally: you could have excellent ideas but problems
translating them into real objects. These methods widen access and as sculpture, in
particular, is regarded as being technically very demanding people tend to be
discouraged from becoming involved. With rapid prototyping you don’t have to possess
manual skills, you can just create.
Christiane Paul
Artists working now in different forms of media, from photography and film to sculpture,
increasingly make use of digital technologies. It does not make sense to subsume all this
work under the category of digital art and assign some specific aesthetics to it. In my
book Digital Art I made the distinction between tool and medium, and this is very
important to consider here. What I mean by tool is the use of digital technologies as a
tool in the process of the creation of an object such as a sculpture. A tool in this case
can be software, or it can be a 3D printer or a milling machine system, but the end
product will be an ‘object’ as we know it in traditional art. If we use digital technologies as
a medium, this implies the work is potentially interactive, dynamic, and customisable,
etc. I am not saying one form of making use of the technologies is superior or inferior to
the other, but it does not make sense to compare rapid-prototyping sculpture to a work
that uses GPS [global positioning system], exists on a palm pilot and involves audience
input. If you start thinking about the aesthetics these two have in common, you might not
be going anywhere. So the tool versus medium distinction is an important one. We
should also consider that rapid prototyping is used now more and more. This does not
mean there is something distinctly digital about the work or that there are specific
aesthetics ascribed to it. There may be works that look hand-crafted and you might learn
they were done by rapid prototyping; or there may be pieces that look as if they were
done completely digitally but are in fact hand-crafted. Something also to keep in mind is
that some works do not reflect explicitly on the process of their manufacture, so there
may be digital sculptures – or sculptures that have been created through rapid
prototyping – that really reflect on their medium, while others don’t.
As a field of artistic practice particularly concerned with form and space, it seems natural
that sculpture has explored the use of digital technologies as a tool in various stages of
the creation and production process. Some sculptors make use of the technology both in
the initial design and the output, whereas others use it in one of those stages. If we look
at the terminology in this field, it becomes obvious it is very broad and can be extremely
confusing; you are dealing with terms such as virtual sculpture, digital sculpture, tele-
sculpture, robo-sculpture. Most of the time the term ‘digital sculpture’ is applied and
refers to objects manufactured through computer-aided design or manufacturing, such
as CNC [computer numerical control] milling or rapid prototyping; virtual sculpture is
used more for projects that exist in the virtual space only and do not have a physical
component. Most sculptors I have talked to over the years seem to feel the label ‘digital’
distracts from what they are doing. They want to be considered sculptors in the first
place, minus the digital, virtual or whatever qualifier is attached to it. Nevertheless, new
tools for modelling and output have changed the construction and perception of three-
dimensional experience and broadened the creative possibilities for sculptors.
Digital media translate the notion of three-dimensional space into the virtual realm, and
vice versa: you can take the virtual object and transform it into an instant object. When
we talk about the virtual realm, tangibility, which is such an intrinsic quality of sculpture,
doesn’t apply. There is something obviously trans-physical about the virtual realm where
things like gravity, scale and material do not matter any more. These are not aspects we
are dealing with in the virtual realm per se. When it comes to computer-aided design, we
are looking at scaling operations, proportional shifts, eccentric vantage points, morphing
processes and other aspects that can be employed as techniques and make a
significant difference in the creation and production of a sculpture. It is also important
that digital technologies allow almost instant transformability from the virtual to the
physical. I wouldn’t say this is instant yet; people predicted we might have affordable 3D
printers on our desks by now and obviously we are not there; but perhaps it won’t take
long.
One very important aspect of the digital medium is that you can make this fluent
transition between different manifestations of information and, as an example, I would
like to talk about John Klima’s piece Guest Book. Klima is not a sculptor but works with
software and often translates it into physical components. This piece was an entry
installation at his show at the Postmasters Gallery in New York and what it consisted of
was the artist’s own old TRS-80 computer – some of you might remember these from
when computers stored information on audio tapes. Visitors to the gallery were asked to
enter their credit card number, or any number of that length, on the computer’s
keyboard. The number was then translated into a unique sound file, a wave file. This
was played back and recorded, and the wave file would then transform a projection
which, in its default state, was actually just a grid of cubes. The sounds would cause the
cubes to protrude and deform and you could preview that virtual sculpture and order it as
a stereolithograph, a 3D object. The object displayed next to the installation was the one
created through the artist’s own credit card number. The point here is we started from a
number, which is transformed into a sound file, which in turn transforms a virtual
sculpture, which can then become physical. This is the type of translatability of data we
are looking at within the digital medium. We received a very good survey of the different
techniques involved in rapid prototyping with the previous presentation, so just to
summarise, you can bring it down to different processes, which are subtractive, additive
or compressive. In milling, for example, you have the subtractive procedure where
something is carved out of a block; then you have the additive one in rapid prototyping
where layers are built of starch or wax-based materials; and you have the compressive
one where, for example, liquid is solidified through the use of lasers. If you make use of
starch-based or wax materials, these produce very delicate objects; they may break
easily. Many artists use a combination of these processes – such as routing, milling,
rapid prototyping – and they are also often using these for creating moulds. The final
sculpture will consist of more traditional materials, yet wouldn’t be possible to produce
without previously creating this rapid-prototyped mould.
People have been using computers for the creation of art since the 1960s or even
earlier. Although it was pretty rare, people also started doing sculptures involving digital
technologies at that time. One of the pioneers in this realm is Chuck Csuri who was
working with computers in the early ‘60s and also created sculptures. It may not look
very polished by today’s standards, but his sculpture Sculpture Graphic / Three
Dimensional Surface was a software-driven alteration of curvature and its frequency and
elevation. The surface of a block was defined through the use of these techniques and it
is basically an exercise in the mutability of form. Csuri, at that time, also wanted very
much to leave the marks of the tool on the object and expose them, something that, in all
likelihood, people wouldn’t want to do today; we have moved into a very different area
and approach. Digital virtual sculpture entered the arena in the 1990s. There have been
several organisations devoted to it and I mention a few examples here, although there
are very many more. In the early nineties, Tim Duffield, Bruce Beasley, Rob Fisher and
David Smalley founded the computer sculpture forum CSF [Computers and Sculpture
Forum], and in 1993 Intersculpt, which is a bi-annual computer sculpture exhibition
conceived by Christian Lavigne and Alexandre Vitkine, was organised by the French
organisation Arts Mathematica. Then there is FAST UK, Keith Brown’s organisation,
which early on was devoted to exploring this medium. In the US, there is also the
College of Design and Architecture, Art and Planning of the University of Cincinnati,
which created virtual sculpture parks within their virtual world. At the Arizona State
University, you have the PRISM lab [Partnership for Research In Stereo Modelling] and
if you look at their website you will see this field cannot be defined clearly as just being
focused on sculpture – what we find here is geometric modelling, spatial visualisation
and a lot of related techniques of data processing. For example, they have been working
on fleshing out a bust of George Washington as an accurate replica, and at the
SIGGRAPH exhibition this year they scanned people’s faces, which of course could be
translated into sculptures. So it becomes clear a lot of related procedures and a range of
mathematical and natural data related to phenomena are being used in the creation of
these sculptures. The process is not only about a specific design software that allows
you to mutate forms, but many artists are writing software in C++ or using data relating
to natural phenomena and translating this into sculpture.
Regarding the basic ‘aesthetic’ characteristics of digital sculpture, I want to be very
careful. It is impossible to look at works from the Renaissance, through Picasso to
Damien Hurst and determine an overall aesthetic. We need to be more specific. So I use
quotation marks for ‘aesthetic’ because I am just going to consider some basic
characteristics crucial to this field.
The technological developments here of course beg the question: in which specific
respects and regards has the computer expanded and changed traditional notions of
sculpture? One thing sculptor Michael Rees has suggested is that there is a refinement
and acceleration of the original system of the perspective, representation and
manufacture of form. This is certainly true. However, the speed of realising physical
representations hasn’t led necessarily to a different experience of physical laws. When
we look at virtual versus digital sculpture, there is one thing always to keep in mind: in
the virtual realm we are not bound by physical laws. Many sculptors are working both
ways, designing in the virtual realm and then manufacturing the work through rapid
prototyping. As soon as a piece enters the physical world, it is bound again to its laws in
some way; you cannot, of course, transcend these yet. They can be transcended in the
virtual realm and the sculptures we are looking at in physical space may bear the mark
of this different notion of space, but they will not be able to transcend the physical laws
we are subjected to. This creates a very interesting tension and space. There is a
marked tendency among digital sculptors to explore the interface between the physical
and the virtual. Very few work in one realm alone.
Another aspect, which has been mentioned already, is that the complexities of virtual
representation can be translated easily into physical objects and, as an example, I
mention the works of Robert Lazzarini. He has been working with the distortion of
perspective and anamorphic perspective, distorting common objects, household objects,
such as a telephone, a chair and hammers. These are scanned, then distorted in the
virtual medium and created through a combination of processes – routing and rapid
prototyping – and the final product is cast again in the original material of the object.
Lazzarini’s violin is made of ebony and bone, etc. – not a type of material you would
associate with rapid prototyping. Among his most well-known works are his skulls, an
obvious allusion to Hans Holbein’s experiment with perspective in The Ambassadors. If
you see Lazzarini’s skulls in real space, they are amazing and really collapse 2D and
3D. I can’t stand in a room with them for too long because they distort what we are used
to in terms of perspective and make me nauseous. Images are not able to capture the
effect, you have to see them in space.
Another piece by Lazzarini, included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, is a distorted
payphone. It is a nine-feet-high replica of the average payphone found on New York
streets and has been created through a combination of routing and rapid prototyping.
Again it distorts the familiar and – alluding to the space of communication we use –
creates a completely different experience of this space or the object related to it. These
two examples of rapid-prototyped sculptures both deal with a refinement or revision of
original visions of perspective and also with the complexities of virtual representations.
Another aspect it is important to mention is that, through processes such as rapid
prototyping and computer-aided design, we can transcend the reference point of the
body. Sculpture mostly, of course, is bound by that reference point – the way we
perceive objects in space and the human body – but in the virtual realm you can, at
least potentially, work on a nano-level or a macro-level that exceeds this reference point.
Another important point made by many digital sculptors is that digital technologies in
general broaden the context for art through representation of data from various
disciplines. This is true, of course, for the digital medium per se because art has always
reflected on its time, the technology of its time and the science of its time; but we are
now at a point where scientists and artists are actually working with the same data sets
and using them in their work, which is a very different thing. Paintings remain more
metaphorical when it comes to the process of reflecting on a science. For example, you
might say there is an obvious connection between Picasso and Einstein. They both
denied this, but the idea of the fourth dimension is something you can detect easily in
cubism and it seems to be very much in sync with the age and its philosophical and
scientific background. Today, we are looking at artists who use the very same data sets
employed in science. Michael Rees is one of the artists who has worked consistently
with data sets from medicine or anatomy. His Anja Spine Series, for example, creates
objects that borrow from medical anatomy for an exploration of what he refers to
frequently as a kind of ‘spiritual psychological anatomy’. You have an anatomical
element and organic forms, such as a spine with ears protruding from it, woven into
complex sculptural structures that raise questions about the scientific validation of
sensuality, or at least transcend the known structure of the body. The title of the series
Anja refers to the sixth of the ‘chakras’. It is a Hindu term; the ‘chakras’ are energy
centres, openings for the energy flow that vitalises the physical body. So Rees alludes to
this Hindu history of the body and a different way of understanding it. The word anja
means command in the sense of spiritual guidance.
Rees created another series called A Life, obviously alluding to artificial life, and looking
at these sculptures, the life forms again combine body parts, but without a reproductive
system, without heads, and basically point to the body as something that is mutable,
‘cloneable’, biology gone haywire. They also explore the evolution of form in relation to
the body. These sculptures are rapid prototyped and obviously were created in the
virtual realm and then transformed into sculptures. For this series Rees worked a lot with
animations to study the movements of these forms. I do not have the actual animations,
but in ‘stills’ from the animation you see these 3D sculptures going through the motions
and get a clearer picture of how they have been developed in physical space. Rees also
worked a lot with the transition point or interface of the physical and virtual, particularly in
his Sculptural User Interface, a software he created with collaborators. This has been
exhibited as the software, where users can actually mutate forms, again, very often
relating to body parts and limbs, and simultaneously you have the rapid-prototyped
version of the sculptures in the gallery space. This type of sculpture works very explicitly
with both aspects.
There are other people exploring this area, like William Latham who has worked with the
idea of artificial life and mutability of form more in the virtual realm. He has created – as
a research fellow in the IBM scientific centre at Winchester – software such as Mutator,
which explores genetic variations based on aesthetic choices. Artificial life and
evolutionary algorithms are a broad field of inquiry within digital art, but Latham's type of
work refers much more to the mutability of sculptural form. Another work based on
scientific data – this time from the geographic realm – is John Klima’s series Discrete
Terrains. This is basically a physical output of his software Earth. It depicts a model of
the earth with all kinds of life data, such as cloud cover. From here you zoom in on
images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite, then go to topographical maps, until you are on
the surface of the earth – that is, a digital reproduction of it – which is hand-crafted or,
better, hand-coded by the artist and gets live weather input from the weather stations in
the respective area. Klima has done rapid-prototype sculptures of different sections of
the terrain with the actual map or satellite image of the area projected onto it from a slide
projector. The images look very ‘digital’ but are actually photos of the installation. All
these sculptures sit on black pedestals – you do not see them in the dark gallery space –
and the sculptures seem to float. While the sculptures are exaggerated in their scale, the
scientific data is accurate – the representation of reality in its many forms.
Moving on to the whole issue of automation, artistic agency and the signature of the
artist, what became very obvious in the first overview and presentation today is that if
you are using rapid prototyping, milling machines, etc., you are not involved in the actual
physical process of creation and we are looking at a tremendous shift here. Heidi
Reitmaier pointed this out earlier, and Michael Rees is one of the sculptors who has
repeatedly made a point of it – for him, to be removed from the physical process of
creation actually means more freedom to work on the conceptual level and makes the
process more transparent. This is something very important to consider.
Regarding digital technologies in general, people have very often criticised or pointed
out that the mark of the artist is lost. With drawings or paintings you have, of course, a
distinct, marked signature on paper, or canvas, which seemingly you lose in the virtual
realm. However, it is misguided to compare the digital type of art, artistic technique and
intervention to something like painting or drawing; it should be compared to other
technological art forms such as photography and film, for example. Photography had to
face the same criticisms: you press a button and there is your photo – where is the art?
What does an artist do? Of course, this neglects the choice of subject, perspective or
lighting – all of the aspects of technology that an artist actually influences. The same
applies to computerised techniques. A lot of artistic signature manifests itself in all kinds
of choices, including the writing of the actual software or working with computer-aided
design. There are also projects that have made an explicit comment on the issue of
agency. Karen Sanders’s 1:10 is one such piece. It consists of sculptures of people on a
one-to-ten scale, little miniatures that are ultimately a piece of conceptual art. What she
does is choose subjects, very often people she knows, and makes an appointment for
them to go to a studio where they will be scanned at 360˚. She is not present; she does
not tell them what posture to take or what clothing to wear, this is completely up to the
people themselves. They are scanned and little sculptures manufactured – plastic is the
final material – which are then painted; Sanders is not involved in any of the production
process and very consciously chooses to let this project remain on a purely conceptual
level. Of course this raises a lot of issues about the technology itself and artistic agency.
Such work really exemplifies the concept of ‘tele-manufacturing’ and the possibilities of
teleporting forms digitally, which was mentioned earlier. It is rarely done – there are so
many other possibilities of exploring the design of a sculpture besides having it
manufactured in different places at the same time. I am not saying it is not happening,
but it is still under-explored.
Before closing, I want to talk briefly about the reception of digital sculpture. Over the
years, in general, there has been a lot more acceptance of digital sculpture and you see
it more and more often, but of course this field has also, like most digital media, run into
the obvious problems and criticisms. First of all, using new technologies in art can have
two diametrically opposed effects. At one end of the critical scale, digital art is dismissed
occasionally as technology on display and showing-off technology. At the other end,
there is the ‘wow’ factor that impresses people beyond the substance of the art itself.
(Meaning, it could be a bad piece, but the technology is impressive and the work gets a
lot of attention.) Any attempt to approach art through technology per se may ultimately
be futile, because in today’s information-based society, almost everything is influenced
by digital technology. Our life is becoming more and more digitised, so focussing on the
technology doesn’t yield many productive results. It is very important, though, to
consider how the technology would change the aesthetics of form.
Another major reason for continued resistance and suspicion from the traditional art
establishment is the possibility of infinite reproduction. At least since Walter Benjamin’s
essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, people should have
been aware of these processes and how modern reproduction processes have
influenced art. Of course the reproduction of sculpture goes back centuries, yet the art
world at large perceives as threatening the idea that something can be manufactured
instantly at various places in the world and is very much focussed on, at least, an edition
model and, at best, the notion of the original. These are just a very few of the aspects
involved in the difficulties of reception.
I think digital technologies offer enormous possibilities for contemporary sculpture and,
at this point, are largely under-explored. What you see in many of the works I have
mentioned is a seeming fusion of process and space. Of course, the digital medium is
very much process-oriented, but in digital sculptures it is often possible to trace the
process of evolution over time, the idea of a form in time, which is what many sculptors
are bringing into this work and what they are now exploring.
Question: My recent background is in game production and I am interested to know
how far you think animation in film impacts on the work you’ve been showing?
Christiane Paul: It impacts very much and that was one of the points I tried to make
earlier. When we are looking at the virtual realm we are dealing with 3D spaces and
forms, at least potentially. There are web pages and 2D spaces, but that is a completely
different world. Yet what is happening in gaming, for example, or the 3D world at large is
not called sculpture. I think these worlds are fusing completely. You have sculptural
objects in the virtual realm and you are creating 3D worlds and forms in both gaming and
sculptural practice, so these realms are becoming virtually indistinguishable. For
example, John Klima is someone who is working with gaming paradigms and is creating
these 3D virtual worlds and objects, and I think there’s a tremendous influence. Gaming
is currently one of the areas in digital art, when it comes to the medium, that is probably
getting the most attention.
Keith Brown
I first became aware of the potential of 3D computer visualisation in the late seventies
but it wasn’t until the early eighties I had the opportunity to have hands-on experience.
At that time I was working with natural materials as a post-minimalist process artist and
was concerned largely with producing work that was dependant for its content and
meaning directly on the inherent qualities of the materials and processes involved in its
making. In this talk I will trace the development of my work as a continuation of this
‘direct’ approach through the use of the computer and related digital technologies to
realise sculptural objects that could not be conceived of or produced by other means.
In the early days of computer visualisation, before 24-bit colour processing, I noticed a
similarity between the work I was making with sliced tree trunks and the rather crude 8-
bit computer graphics and 3D modelling software of the time. There was also a
remarkable and coincidental comparison between some of the operations I performed
with my physical sculptures and many of the standard modelling tools available in 3D
modelling software, such as squeezing, skewing, stretching, lofting, etc.
Initially, I realised the potential of the computer as a design tool to visualise
very complex physical structures in advance of a commitment to make them as actual
objects. I found I could visualise ideas in just a few hours that would have otherwise
taken months to make. Subsequently I abandoned the need to make my sculpture
physically manifest and was content for many years to work entirely within the virtual
environment. The trans-physical aspect of the virtual environment provided new
possibilities for sculpture and changed radically my previous modes of experience which
were defined by gravity, scale and the limitations of material. I began to realise this
technology provided much more than a versatile set of design tools and was in fact a
medium in its own right.
In the mid-nineties, being one of the few digital sculptors working in the U.K., I was
invited to join the steering committee for the JISC CALM [Creating Art with Layer
Manufacture] project. This was my first introduction to rapid prototyping and an
experience that made an enormous contribution to the development of my research and
practice, bringing me full circle to producing actual objects again, but objects of a
different order to anything I could have produced before. Since then I have explored
many different rapid-prototyping techniques as a means to actualise my cyber sculpture.
For me rapid prototyping has become much more than a prototype technology and, in
many instances, transcends this to become end product.
I am going to begin by contextualising my digital sculpture practice in terms of some very
low-tech beginnings, which date from about 1975 to the early 1980s. I come from a post-
minimalist, process-art background, which formed a large part of my art education in the
early 70s and has had a strong influence on the work I am doing now with computers. I
make reference to these early works, which were produced by responding to the
materials used, because I want to demonstrate how I shifted from a position where I
began initially to use computer software as a design tool, and then moved more towards
an understanding of it as a medium in its own right.
In the mid 70s I was working with materials such as sawdust, glass and tree trunks,
creating pieces directly dependant upon the inherent qualities of the materials used.
Coincidently, the early 8-bit graphics on computer monitors resembled some of the
qualities I was producing with my sculpture and I became very interested in this
connection. Some of the operations I was concerned with, for example turning an object
through itself by alternating the placement of the slices through 180°, are of importance
because now I do very similar things digitally and there are direct references between
my early and my current work. Slicing up several logs and displacing them by alternating
the slices, to the left and right, I produced hybrid forms in between – an operation I shall
refer to in some recent digital sculpture. For another work, I alternated the slices to the
left and right by more than the diameter of each slice so they no longer fitted on top of
each other and collapsed into two near-identical columns, in effect cloning the object; in
CAD this is a fairly straightforward technique: you can clone and copy with a single
command.
In my piece Tree O I cut a slice, then another half the thickness of the first, and so on. I
placed all the thin slices in one column and all the thick slices in the other. I had two-
thirds of the whole in one object and one third in the other. The original form, from which
they were derived, is implied through its absence. This also has strong references to
cloning, to mother and child, replication, notions of unity and completeness. In 3D
modelling software, the ability to squeeze and stretch is very straightforward.
With another of my works I used a skewing technique; the slices were laid consecutively,
at an angle, on the ground. This gave the object a really curious quality, almost defying
the rules of physics, because trees can’t be squashed and stretched like that. The rather
strange physical deformation developed a kind of strong gravitational force on the
objects. Then, of course, there is a question of how much should you skew something –
do you skew it a lot or a little? In one piece I shoved three sliced trees into an earth
bank, skewing them backwards until they made contact with the surface of the bank,
which in physical terms said stop. From the front you could see the whole piece come
together visually in a coherent way.
In another piece an elm tree was cut through at an angle of about 20° into thin slices.
The slices were then placed consecutively in order to form a vertical stack, so the object
was squashed from 10m. tall down to 3.5m. and expanded sideways in the x,y
dimension – so having squashed it in the z, it expanded in the x,y, which is something
you can do very easily using CAD.
Sending objects up a helical path is a fairly straightforward technique in 3D CAD
programmes. It was precisely because of these coincidental similarities between the
digital appearance of my work with trees and early computer graphics visualisation that I
began originally to use the computer as a design tool. The very first time I used a
graphics computer was about 1981-82. It was the Quantell Magic Paint Box. We didn’t
have ‘Harry’, which was the 3D CAD and animation aspect, so I contented myself using
it as a fairly sophisticated drawing tool. You could draw with a mouse using a predefined
brush shape on a programme called MacDraw, and if you moved your hand around fast
enough you could deposit images behind you as you went. I found that quite interesting
because I was working with slicing and stacking, and this technique resembled that
process. As there were no desktop colour printers in those days I resorted to coloured
pencils to colour black & white laser prints. For some works, I cut the slices into wedges
and rearranged them to produce symmetrical forms with asymmetrical interiors. I
couldn’t quite get my mind around the idea that an object could be both symmetrical and
asymmetrical simultaneously and I had actually to make the piece to understand this.
The possibilities for these works were becoming ever more complex and I needed to
build special apparatus to take tree trunks apart accurately into slices and wedge-
shaped segments, with very fine tolerances, in order to re-construct them successfully to
the desired effect.
When CAD really came into its own was with a piece of mine designed with Infini-D,
early photorealistic modelling and rendering software that dates back to the 80s. What I
did was to take eight tree trunks of varying diameters, cut them into slices, cut the slices
into wedges and rearrange them into eight columns, each containing elements of the
other. So all I was doing was moving the information sideways through space into the
next stack. This was something that would have taken probably three or four months
actually to make, but in just a couple of days on the computer I had visualised the piece
in detail.
I found I was able to visualise exactly what I wanted before I made it and then, of course,
that began to take over. With an early CAD design for a sliced tree piece – visualised
with Aldus Super 3D – although the graphics were crude, it gave a good enough idea of
what the finished work might look like prior to its construction. It went somewhat further
than 2D drawing because one could move the 3D object around on the monitor to
examine it from any angle of view. Making a study for the piece with real material and
following the curvature of the CAD design, there’s a point where I can’t fix another slice
onto the end because the next slice would fall to the floor since there’s nothing left to fix
it to. However, this is not a problem when you move into the gravity-free cyber
environment. You can extend the operation of the work into space in a way that you
couldn’t do in the ‘actual’ world. I think digital technologies are as much a part of reality
as anything else here, so to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ I tend to use terms
such as ‘actual’, ‘manifests’ and ‘cyber’ when looking for alternatives to the word ‘real’.
At this point I moved over completely into the cyber environment enjoying the new-found
freedoms it afforded. I was quite content for a while to design and show objects within
that environment and even built galleries with lighting racks, etc. to display them as they
would appear if made manifest. Developments in software and hardware also had a part
to play in the development of the work at this stage. I was using 3ds Max and the facility
to be able to interact with this in a more intuitive way, compared to the previous version
of 3ds, was very important too. In 3ds, you had separate modules for drawing, modelling
and rendering. This was a little like having to turn off the lights when you needed to
modify your model. As the software and hardware became more powerful, it offered
increased intuitive interaction with the CAD with real-time textures and shading. Using
some of the default functions available within the tools menu to affect the medium could
produce interesting and surprising results. For example, in one piece I applied a noise
modifier to the object and the polygonal geometry mutated in such a way as to cause a
rather gorgeous rippling effect. I don’t believe you could conceive of or produce that
quality by any other means.
Starting now with the current work, for reasons best known to myself, I always work with
the torus. I won’t go into why as it will take too long to explain and goes beyond the remit
set out here. But it’s got something to do with the fact it is a singularity and it is a
complete entity within itself. It has also, within the software that I use, a greater number
of changeable parameters than any of the other generic primitives. For instance, the
diameters of the cross-section of the torus can be deformed to make them eccentric, one
can insert lumps, move those lumps on the path of the torus and change their quantity
and scale, but it is very important to me that I always retain this singular object as a
starting point for the sculpture. The earlier tree sculpture and the work preceding it was
very objective, very conceptual in a sense; the aesthetics of the work were not only in
terms of the visual but were as much a part of what the idea was about and the
irrefutable spatial/physical logistics of the each sculpture’s materiality.
More recently I have allowed subjective elements to come back into the work to a far
greater extent, placing more emphasis on them than I did before. I explore the
possibilities made available through manipulating forms in the cyber environment and,
because they don’t behave in the same way as they do in the actual world (in the
physically manifest world), it is full of surprises. A sense of surprise in terms of not really
expecting the results that occur, a reaching beyond the imagination to something else
that can only happen through this sort of interaction within the medium. In my sculpture I
am bringing the cross sections of single tori through each other. To explain: in a torus
you have an outside diameter of the whole object, then you have the cross-section
diameter of its tubular thickness. I am bringing the cross sections of the tube together
and overlapping them by reducing the overall diameter. In doing this, things begin to
happen in terms of the form which you cannot achieve with actual materials in the real
world: clay, wood, stone, metals, etc., don’t behave like that. This piece was my first ever
rapid-prototype sculpture made in this way as part of the CALM project. It was produced
as a SLS. I made it like this because it was to be cast in bronze, bearing in mind the
need to take a mould for an investment cast. In a solid view image – a cross section of
the geometry of the CALM piece – you can see the deformed torus surface intersecting
itself: blue interior, red exterior. So whilst the various elements on the surface might look
arbitrary in the way they protrude through the surface, like a shark’s fin breaking the
surface of water, there is a lot more of it underneath, inside, iceberg-like. It is not an
accident that the various elements occur on the surface of the sculpture because they
are all interconnected and protruding from within. One might go back to Rodin and talk
about forms emanating from within, or Brancusi and talk about not imitating the outward
surfaces of things but getting to their essence. And, for me, this has to do with the way in
which I deal with the essential topological aspects of form. Transposing the work into
traditional materials such as bronze may seem contradictory to some, given the integrity
of the computer processes that produce these objects, but rapid-prototyping materials
and processes do have their limitations – sometimes appropriate, sometimes not. I find
myself with a foot in both camps. On the one hand you have the appropriateness of the
rapid-prototyping process and material, and, coming from the post-minimalist process
artist’s position, material was very much a part of what the work was about. Moving into
burnished bronze with a highly reflective surface is justifiably appropriate because in the
mirroring of the intersecting burnished bronze surface, the illusory aspects of the form
and where it actually passes through itself physically are emulated within the reflections.
So you have a resulting juxtaposition between the virtual and the real within the same
manifest object.
This sculpture was produced with the LOM technique, one of the earlier techniques of
layer manufacturing with lasers, and I chose to accept the material qualities of the rapid-
prototyping process as integral to this sculpture. The stratification of the layers combined
with the grid effect, burned into the surface by the laser, generated a contrasting
geometry that complimented the organic aspect of the form.
Moving to another area, where there are many interesting possibilities within the CAD
environment, one may make objects transparent; you can affect the degrees of opacity
of the elements you are dealing with. However, when it comes to rapid-prototyping
materials, this becomes a bit of a tricky issue where one may wish to show the interior of
the object and the internal geometry which is integral to it. To find a rapid-prototype
process that will reveal the internal workings and geometries of a solid isn’t there yet, or
at least I am not aware if it is. One SLA piece, made in a transparent resin, comes
close, while another work utilises a rendering technique which applies a material wire
frame so you can see through the surface of the object to its interior. And in another
example, a lattice modifier is applied to modify the topology further in such a way as to
generate harmonies that cannot be achieved with actual materials. Using the Stratasys
FDM [Fused Deposition Modelling] process it is possible to manufacture these very
complex objects. By manipulating the form in CAD, in a direct and intuitive way, one is
continually surprised by some of the possibilities that occur.
My sculpture was generated specifically to take advantage of the FDM process in ABS
plastic, using a technique called ‘waterworks’, which uses water-soluble support material
and ultrasonics for its removal. This technique can cope with the most complex of
geometries and difficult undercuts are easily dealt with. Trying to mix together, in
complex forms, the two qualities of transparent solids and opaque solids is extremely
difficult using rapid-prototype devices. Even with the best materials and processes,
completely enclosed internal cavities would contain unwanted support material, which
would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remove. In the cyber environment, 3D
form can be seen to behave with some of the qualities inherent in light and sound, where
boundaries intersect and surfaces pass through each other. It is possible to make them
visibly available as 3D objects, using virtual-reality techniques, headsets and shutter
glasses, etc. to see 3D through these stereoscopic devices.
In this next section I will explain some alternative means by which these qualities can be
made manifest. In July 2000 I began working with a group of technologists at De
Montfort University in the Engineering & Computing Sciences Department called the ‘3D
Biomedical Technologies Imaging Group’. I have been working with the group for nearly
five years and as an artist I have been delighted to be able to contribute towards the
development of this research. We first projected a three-dimensional sculptural object
into true space at Intersculpt2001 in the Righton Gallery at MMU. The technique is rather
like holography but achieved with natural light; you don’t need laser light to produce the
3D effect. One of the most exciting aspects of this technique is the possibility to deliver
real-time interactivity and 3D broadcast media. This technology is on the cutting edge
and very close to being able to achieve this, either via the World Wide Web or various
other broadcast technologies. It is a very exciting prospect to have a visible 3D object
projected into your home on a high-resolution large format plasma screen. Not quite the
Star Trek ‘holography deck’, but you can walk into these 3D projections; you can put
your hands into them.
At this early prototype stage it was a case of having to view the scene through a small
window and I wanted to develop a larger window for application in sculpture installation. I
worked on this during the summer of 2002 and built the necessary apparatus in my
studio. According to the optics specialist on the team, the big viewing window wouldn’t
work in this system, although there were other, more complex, ways to achieve it. It was
not considered possible to get a window bigger than the aperture of the projector itself.
Having build this apparatus and tested it I discovered this was the case. When I had first
heard about the projector, I had imagined this large-scale possibility. So I built a large
window to experiment with in the studio. The initial experiments were very disappointing
since they proved the limitations of the viewing window aperture to be the same as the
projector aperture 10” X 8” – as had been predicted. To my surprise, as I stepped
backwards I entered a viewing position that displayed the 3D object in the 6’ x 4’ window
I had built for the experiment. By chance I had realised my initial vision of what this
technology might be capable of. A twelve-minute animation was generated specifically to
take full advantage of the technique. The 3D animation generates apparently solid
objects, effortlessly passing through each other, sharing the same x,y,x, coordinates. I
have an idealised version of how I would like to see the installation. It would be two 3m.
by 2m. sheets of glass at right angles to each other with retro-reflective material
attached to one wall and a projector hidden in the opposite wall, so that all you would
need to navigate the 3D virtual world would be these two sheets of glass in an otherwise
interference-free environment, seamlessly uniting the cyber with the real.
Roger Clarke
I made my first sculpture, Shaggy, as a present for my grandfather’s 70th birthday; I
was five. Shaggy, named after one of my favourite characters in the cartoon Scooby
Doo, consisted of a cardboard loo roll tube, some knitting wool and a length of rough
wood sawn into three parts and nailed together. The resulting form, rather
surprisingly, resembled a horse not a human figure, but despite my family’s
protestations something was wrong with the title, I was adamant what I had created
was Shaggy. He was placed in a prominent place in my grandparent’s house, for
what turned out to be a rather embarrassingly long time. Fortunately for you, all you
have to do is imagine him.
The first rapid-prototyping sculpture I made, produced here at De Montfort University,
was the result of a couple of hours testing I did from a modelling package called
FreeForm that used a haptic device to interact with a virtual block of material. After
years of getting to grips with a range of modelling software, this equipment was quite
a revelation because it seemed the most intuitive way I had encountered to model on
a computer. What made the experience even more remarkable was that I saved the
file onto a CD-ROM, took it to the Centre For Rapid Development, and within the
space of a few hours it had been rapid prototyped and had a completely different
quality from when it was simply a computer model because it existed in real space
and weighed rather a lot.
These two sculptures can be seen as extremes of artistic endeavour with almost
nothing in common, except of course the author – me. The first was made with a
degree of innocence, minimum skill and knowledge, and readily available materials
and tools. The second was made with technology that has come about through
intensive research and development, and manufactured with equipment that requires
a high degree of expertise for it to function. The reason I began my presentation with
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them is because they share an immediacy of production attainable only when the
equipment being used does not get in the way of the creative process. In addition,
they illustrate how much sculptural practice has changed over the last two decades,
from one that was prominently low-tech to one that would be inconceivable without
the computer as a tool. While the tools may have become more sophisticated,
however, I do not think they have had an adverse effect on the process I go through
to make a sculpture.
When I started making sculptures as a student, I was interested in how to choose,
arrange, combine and manipulate materials into a form. I experimented with any
material I encountered, explored its qualities and limitations and, in much the same
way as when I was a child, was more than happy just to see what would happen. The
process of making a piece did not start with anything pre-determined and there could
be any number of stages between the beginning and conclusion, if there was one at
all. Even if there were nothing substantial to show at the end, what I did learn has
been invaluable subsequently.
The next pieces I will discuss were made in the years after university and begun
when I was the Henry Moore Sculpture Fellow at Winchester School of Art. I chose a
material I could manipulate to create a form but which needed no structure other than
itself. I wanted these works to have a surface that separated them clearly from the
rest of space but which still enabled the viewer to see beyond the surface of the
object, through the inside and beyond. I wanted to be able to make adjustments to
the proportion of the form with a minimum of effort and made the sculptures with
panels that could be removed easily and replaced by others. With my interest ranging
from architecture to micro-components, I wanted the sculptures to have the sense of
coming from something and somewhere else, but to be difficult to place in scale from
the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. I wanted them also to be absolutely stable,
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immobile and to hug the floor or wall, but at the same time to flicker and appear to
wobble as one walked past.
The first time I considered there could be a connection between this work and
computer modelling was when I met someone who asked what modelling software I
used to design my sculptures and where they were being produced. It seems
remarkable now, but at the time I was surprised, not only because I didn’t use a
computer and had no experience of modelling software, but also because I couldn’t
imagine what I could gain from such technology. After all, I could do everything I
wanted to already, but within my own space in relation to my own scale with
materials and processes I knew very well.
Of course I did become curious and, in a rather haphazard way, started to learn
computer modelling. At first I used it as a way of recording shapes of forms I could
employ in my work, and began to see the potential of visualising sculptures before I
started to make them. Finally, with the introduction of colour in my work, I realised it
could help solve colour and proportional combinations as well as the planning of
installations. When I produced a piece for the Economist Plaza, London, in a pre-
coated material manufactured by what was then British Steel, I was able to send a
model from which they could work out the exact quantity and measurements of the
model which was despatched to me two days later. I started to become interested in
how computer modelling was used in other disciplines, what purpose it served and
whether there was a physical outcome. One of the applications that particularly
caught my attention was a piece of software called RasMol – partly because there
was a Macintosh version, which was quite rare at the time – used for visualising
molecular structures within a three-dimensional space. With this software, it was
possible to find the atomic co-ordinate files of a molecule from a database, see it in a
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range of different formats and rotate it so it could be seen from different vantage
points.
I chose a representation of a testosterone molecule for Testarossa, which took a long
time to complete and made me realise the practical difficulties of making in real
space a sculpture that had been created in a virtual space. It may seem obvious, but
at the time I didn’t see the models I had been making as particularly virtual because
in my own mind I knew what scale they were, what they were made in, what their
axes were and how they would be fabricated. Testarossa presented me with a new
set of problems: whilst I had noticed it was simple in a modelling programme to push
two objects into each other without adverse effect to either, it quickly became
apparent this was not the case in my own studio. Instead, each of the forty-five
spheres I cast in resin and fibreglass had to have sections sliced off carefully until it
fitted the next exactly. In many cases less than a tiny fraction of the sphere was
used, but getting the angle cut correctly could take many attempts. What made it
harder was that I was working from a series of prints taken from different vantage
points rather than a screen, and constructed it by rotating the sculpture to match
each one of these prints in turn.
It became clear this was never going to be the way to make future sculptures and I
realised there had to be a better way to produce something this complex in real
space. As I wanted to achieve something physical to create a presence and take up
space, I needed to find a process that would transfer computer models into my own
space.
Which leads me back to my first rapid-prototype sculpture. As I have said, it was
incredible then to find a process that could manufacture a piece of work straight from
a computer model without having to negotiate all the difficulties I had encountered
with Testarossa. It felt as if science fiction had become fact and Star Trek technology
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– the ‘replicator’ – was within my sight. But a number of limitations within the process
meant it wasn’t entirely suitable. The first was scale. The largest part that could be
made then was a quarter cubic metre; to make one of my sculptures the size I
wanted would take a number of parts. The second was material. There simply wasn’t
the range of material qualities available I wanted in my work. Finally there was the
cost. Because of the time it took to get my first object produced, and with the
prospect of having to produce quite a few more to get the size I wanted, it became
clear the cost would be prohibitive. However, even though rapid prototyping was not
the answer at the time and is not the process I employ currently in the production of
finished work, the experience has had a very significant effect on how I produce my
work. Taking the lead from a sculpture Bruce Gernand produced, I now slice my
models into a series of layers, which are then sent to a company to be CNC milled
with the resulting layers of MDF [medium-density fibreboard] re-configured to create
the form. The use of layer manufacturing comes straight from rapid prototyping. I do
still need to use more traditional techniques to get the quality I want, but one of the
most time-consuming parts of the production process is completed far faster and at
far lower cost.
A new work I am making stems from research I began after seeing a picture on the
front of the Guardian some time ago. It was a rendered model created from data
collected by a group of scientists based mostly in the U.K. in a survey of some
15,500 galaxies. What interested me most was that the visual representation had
been created by the transformation of data, which would otherwise have had no form,
into a three-dimensional object to make the information easier to read and
understand. From this initial interest, I have been meeting regularly over the last two
years a colleague at the University of Bath whose research encompasses
visualisation, graphical representation, meaning and cognition. With a particular
interest in employing artistic techniques to develop better ways of depicting data, we
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are beginning to identify an area for collaborative research. In addition to finding out
how to compile data and forms, which requires me to learn programming, my
research lies in exploring what happens when these visualisations enter real space
and whether, when they are in this space, the information they hold can become
clearer than when they are virtual. I am fairly sure there will be a time when rapid
prototyping plays a part in this research.
Question: Are the only things stopping you using rapid prototyping scale and cost?
Roger Clarke: Absolutely. I wasn’t aware before today that colour could be
introduced to rapid prototypes, so I can see there is a possibility of using them, but if
they were made to the scale I am looking at, they would be made in quite a few
sections.
Question: So it ends up being a question of cost?
Roger Clarke: Yes. Certainly a question of cost.
Question: One of the reasons you got interested in the computer was a combination
of using it as a labour-saving device and the speed with which it allowed you to work
through a creation. The issue of speed is interesting because it is referred to in your
discussion, and in previous discussions, as an unqualified good. The faster you can
work through ideas, the better. Do you think it an unqualified good? For a student,
one of the things that distinguishes painting from sculpture is the decision-making
process in sculpture is generally slower. If you don’t want to make a decision every
second with paint on the end of your brush, then sculpture is, perhaps, more
appealing. I was wondering whether you have any doubts about the benefits of
speed?
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Roger Clarke: I have no doubts about the benefit of speed, but don’t think computer
modelling and rapid prototyping are appropriate for everything. If you were to
consider me going back to my first sculpture, Shaggy, the idea of modelling that on a
computer, the idea of wool as a tail or whatever, would be ridiculous. The part of
computer modelling I am interested in is not to replicate exactly what you can do very
simply in the physical world. I am not interested in modelling something like a Rodin
sculpture. My interest lies now in the idea that data create these models, or can be
reconfigured to create these models, and in a way they are representations of those
things we can’t see. I still make things in my studio without the use of a computer. A
lot of the stuff I do I can do quickly. I don’t have a 3D printer, so the most simple thing
for me to do is get the material and work out what is going to happen. Sometimes I
start with that before I begin the computer model. I don’t think it is suitable always.
More and more today we are looking at it becoming the source for work. And that is
when it works best.
Question: I think the issue of speed is really interesting because that is a myth in a
way; our whole culture has bought into this notion that digital activities are much
quicker and so on. I don’t think they are – they are not for me. I have to struggle to
learn this and learn that. Ultimately it is a myth I think.
Roger Clarke: I think that is true and it is a myth that has a lot of power and the
reason I brought it up is because it has been referred to a number of times today as a
reason for being involved in rapid prototyping.
Christiane Paul: We have to distinguish which speed we are talking about. For
example, email was supposed to make things speedier and, in the end, you get
caught up in an endless process and it has created a new type of work. When it
comes to rapid prototyping, if you think about the John Klima terrains, he would have
done them by himself; he would have been busy for a few years, rather than an
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afternoon. I am not talking about the modelling work, the software and everything. In
that case it is very much about the speed of creation. I think you have to look at the
particulars of each and every work, where it speeds up the process and where it
doesn’t at all. Of course you need a certain amount of time – which you don’t want to
shorten in any way – to conceptualise things and realise them.
Roger Clarke: If I had been able to make Testarossa by rapid prototyping, it would
have been entirely suitable. The process of making took a very, very long time. To
learn the modelling, to learn the techniques, to learn how the files can be sent off for
rapid prototyping, that isn’t a speedy process, but once you have a measure of those
tools, then it is a fairly rapid process and speed can be important. I like the idea I can
model something in the evening, send it off and have it milled the next day. This can
make me more productive.
David Wimpenny: I am from an engineering background and the way computer-
aided design was introduced into design offices, everyone complained it was slower
than using a standard drawing board for the objects. However, nobody within the
engineering field who uses CAD could ever go back to the old system. It is not
necessarily the speed of the original design, it is the adaptability to take sections of
the design and modify them, and it is that re-use and ability to change things without
having to start from scratch where computer-aided design works. It does not work if
you are selling one object and never use that shape again; it is a waste of time. That
is where we have to be within the art: you can develop that principle of recycling
certain things. Perhaps it is against the ethos of the arts community but in
engineering the reason why we have cars that look the same year after year is
because it is the easiest way – it is easier to modify something than to start from
scratch.
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Keith Brown: I think rapid prototyping is an unfortunate term for layer manufacturing
– it became a buzz word in the Eighties and a lot of people used it to get the
sponsorship and equipment they needed to do the sorts of things they wanted to do.
Obviously in industry it might well be faster than the traditional machining processes
to produce an object that engineers and designers can actually feel and look at. For
me, as an artist, it is not the speed that is important, but the possibility of being able
to produce objects you can’t really produce by any other means. In some ways, layer
manufacturing is not too different from making a clay pot using a standard technique,
or from bricklaying; as a kind of layer manufacturing in itself it is not new, but
combined with the precision of computing technology, it’s absolutely amazing in its
capacity to bring about possibilities that otherwise couldn’t occur. I mentioned the
intuitive aspect of working with software and being able to respond to it
spontaneously, that is important in terms of rapidity. But other than that, I don’t care if
it takes six months for the object to be built if it merits that. It has to produce
something you can’t make any other way. Of the last two sculptures I discussed, one
took 78 hours, the other 63. That is not quick. In manufacturing terms it is, but you
know when you get a piece of clay you can make something in a few minutes.
David Wimpenny: In terms of scale you are right, but the latest rapid-prototyping
machine is to make and build. Historically it comes from a different place, but once
you are building the sort of sculptures you want to make quickly, it will be equally
rapid.
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Annie Cattrell
I intend to discuss a number of different projects and exhibitions I have been involved
with and the ideas behind them. A lot of the time I work in collaboration with scientists
and use scientific information in combination with new technological processes and
materials.
In 1996 I was asked to make to a ‘science-specific work’ for a small building called a
gazebo which had been designed as a place to think and write in. I wanted to work
with light-emitting materials so I chose to use fibre-optic cables. The windows on the
first floor of the gazebo faced north, south, east and west in order to maximise the
amount of natural light entering the upper first floor space. I wanted to bring the
natural light (from above these windows) into the dark basement area using the fibre-
optic cables as conduits for sunlight. The cables carried the sunlight from the rooftop,
circumnavigating the sides of the building and travelling through the lower ground-
floor door into the blacked-out basement. A lot of the work I have been making, at
that time, was informed by talking with scientists and it centred around the idea of the
mind and finding ways of revealing how the brain functions. In Gazebo the fibre-optic
cables ended in the basement and travelled along the floor and up the sides of a
small scale plaster model (which echoed roughly the same proportions as the outer
building minus the roof). When the basement door was closed the sunlight shone
from the ends of the cables acting as a kind device for orientation (a compass). The
building became a metaphor for the mind, the cables acted as sensors ‘drawing’ light
into the basement (normally used for storage of garden tools), making this space
private and contemplative.
After completing Gazebo I began to focus upon trying to find out about and see what
is inside the human living head/mind. I became the recipient of the ACE Helen
Chadwick Fellowship in 2000-01, and during this time I was fortunate to be given
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access to watch brain surgery by neurosurgeon Mr Peter Teddy at the Radcliffe
Hospital in Oxford. It was of particular interest to me how the brain surgeons
prepared for and found out as much as they could about the patient’s condition prior
to their operation. Although a lot of the planning of the surgery is informed through
the use of brain-scanning technologies such as CT, MRI and FMRI, during
operations surgeons also use their sense of touch, knowledge, experience and, it
appears, intuition. While operating the surgeon attaches sensors, which act as
coordinates, to the patient’s head and this, in combination with the brain scans,
allows as much accuracy as possible throughout the surgery.
Informed by these experiences I worked on a project in an old operating theatre, now
the Crichton Museum, in Dumfries (Scotland) where brain surgery with simple low-
tech hand tools took place up until the 1950s. It was not so much these
unsophisticated tools I was interested in, more the idea of going into someone’s head
and perhaps affecting their thoughts or emotions irreversibly. These early surgical
tools were similar to those found in any work box: drills, files and hammers, etc. In
memory of the people who had undergone brain surgery during those times, I made
an installation positioned mainly on the operating table. I fabricated a three-
dimensional fine grid of glass to fit on top of the operating table where the patient
would have been lying. It was a grid and graph combined, picking up the
inaccuracies of my hand during the process of making.
In 2002 I was Leverhume artist-in-residence at the Royal Institution, London, which
contains the Faraday Museum. I spent a year here, partly as a consequence of
meeting the Director of the Royal Institution, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, at
Oxford, who introduced me to the then art/science coordinator there, Dr Trudy
Prescott. At the Royal Institution they had a preparation room which resembled a
laboratory and workshop where they made models and experiments for their public
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lectures. In the research areas of the Royal Institution the scientists were all solid
state chemists working in laboratories at the top and basement of the building. The
‘wet labs’, where more traditional hands-on experiments took place, were also
historically where the alchemical experiments had happened (Faraday, etc.). The
scientists upstairs used their highly sophisticated computers as laboratories, doing
mathematical calculations and 3D rendering faster than had ever been done before.
While at the Royal Institution, I looked at ways in which medical imaging could make
the interior of the living body and mind be more visible. I became interested in the
actual way in which thoughts and sensations could be seen using FMRI [functional
magnetic resonance imaging] brain-scanning techniques. The brain is a highly
complex visceral, physiological entity, as is the body. Historically the brain has been
considered to be somewhere quite inaccessible and unknown. If your brain begins to
show signs of disorder it is entirely different to healing a break in your arm.
In Oxford I looked at PET [positron emission tomography] scanning and used
functional MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] scanning which shows the oxygen
uptake within the brain and displays activity that way. At a fine level you can actually
see the electrical impulses in a brain, which go at about 250 miles per hour between
the synapses. I got my brain scanned and it was quite a revelation, not from a
narcissistic point of view but because I could, in a way, look at what I was thinking. I
couldn’t see my own actual thoughts in the scans, but I could see the activity and
what I am made of, and that was interesting on a subjective, as well as an
anatomical, level.
One of the surgical procedures I watched was an ‘awake craniotomy’ when the
patient was brought into a conscious state once they had been opened up; it involved
the surgeon, Mr Henry Marsh, working on the brain while the patient talked. This had
a profound effect on me. The surgeon knew how interested I was in the physical
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nature of the brain (as well as how it functions) and at one stage when he was
looking down his magnifying lens into the patient’s brain he got me over and said:
‘thought is physical’. This was the premise of the work I have produced and later
informed new developments.
In Oxford I had my own brain scanned. First we did two experiments on the senses –
one with hearing, the other with seeing – and made images of the active areas within
my brain. Previously I had found images like these in newspapers, for example when
a research team is trying to identify an area in the brain which is responsible for
metal illness such as schizophrenia or perhaps sensationally psychopathic
behaviour. It has become a common way in which scientists use graphic imagery and
3D modelling to evaluate their experiments. We modelled the active areas of the five
senses within the human brain, revealing the actual volumes and shapes which
mapped the specific locations three dimensionally. When working on this project one
of the questions I asked myself was whether it would be possible to make
consciousness visible. A massive question and I don’t think I have even begun to
address it, but that was the kind of original idea I started out with before I decided to
make Sense (a completed artwork now owned by the Wellcome Trust).
When you scan a brain this way, it reveals activity within the brain and the oxygen
uptake. What I was really interested in was taking away the rest of the brain and
allowing just those active areas to be made visible. We used colour-coding to
remember and plot three-dimensionally which blobs were which. We made rapid
prototypes of the five senses. I was fortunate, partly because the work was being
made for a show in the Science Museum for an exhibition called Head On – Art with
the Brain in Mind, and also because the company I was involved with – 3D Systems
in Hemel Hempstead – sponsored me. As we have already discussed, it is an
expensive process.
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In Seeing (part of Sense), it is the back of the brain which is active. I used SLA resin
when getting the rapid prototype model made and it was interesting how the
discolouration occurred when it was encapsulated in clear, hot sure resin. The
reason it was encapsulated in transparent resin was to allow the active areas of the
brain to have its co-ordinates in three-dimensional space in relation to the rest of the
brain and skull (had they been there). Of incredible importance to me was how it was
as if I were casting something that was alive, but of course you can’t do that. There
was a paradox: this momentary, fleeting activation in the brain isn’t really solid and
frozen at all but it does reveal a moment of its behaviour.
Last summer at the Royal Institution’s Faraday Museum I exhibited a series of the
five senses – smelling, hearing, touching, seeing and tasting. The idea was to view
each one from the side and look down into it to see how the active areas would
almost fit together. It was an interesting project to complete because (although this
wasn’t my intention when I set out to make Sense) I think some of the scientists I
worked with found it useful as a teaching device.
As for the appropriateness of rapid prototyping, I don’t use it in a straightforward way
or because it is the latest technology. For me it bridges the translation from the digital
information from science into a rapid-prototyped model/sculpture. This poses the
question: why model by hand when you go straight from the computer and then into
3D without actually touching the object?
Other anatomical work I have made isolated parts of the body – such as the heart
and the lungs. These pieces were made specifically in transparent laboratory glass
partly to heighten the sense of specific organs, what they do and their fragility
(mortality). For example, lungs are the organs where enters the body, circulates
through the heart and eventually effects thought in the brain/mind. The way in which
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these pieces were displayed was important, somewhere between chest and head
height, therefore emphasising the visceral connection between mind and body.
The relationship between digital scanning and hand modelling was also at the root of
a piece called Currents. I modelled the surface of a wavy sea and once it was
exhibited I was asked questions such as: ‘how did you cast the sea? Did you go with
plaster and pour it on the sea?’ For a sculptor this is a ludicrous thing to imagine
because obviously plaster would go straight through the surface and sink. It might be
interesting to scan the sea but lasers react to shiny surfaces and bounce off them in
interesting but not accurate ways! Currents was 3 metres square, made of sections –
I think 64 in all. They fit together and are all different; deliberately there isn’t a real
focal point within the work. The surface of the sea in Currents is reflective and frozen;
people activate the movement when they walk around it.
Aperture (a piece with echoes of early technology Campbell Stokes Sunshine
Recorder in combination with state-of-the-art laser technology) was made while I was
undertaking one of the Berwick-upon-Tweed fellowships. The Campbell Stokes
Sunshine Recorder has strips of green treated paper behind a sphere of glass; the
sun comes through the sphere and, as it burns round during the day, creates a line,
which shows how long it shone for as well as its intensity each day. Aperture had
sixty-four days of sunshine – or lack of it – displayed in the Berwick gymnasium.
Each strip of the green paper was scanned into a computer and then laser cut by a
company in Chelmsford; it showed the fingerprint or language of the sunshine on a
particular day. I liked the parallel between the sun burning a hole into the paper and
the laser technology that burned through the metal. What I didn’t anticipate when I
installed this work was the emotional poignancy it held for some viewers who, when
they went round the other side and saw the actual date inscribed on the rear of the
metal sheet, could remember very specifically what was happening on that day. One
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of the ‘days’ with no sunshine at all triggered emotions for a viewer I had never
imagined anyone looking at a blank piece of metal would feel. In this, strange light
coding seemed to be the beginnings of another kind of language, which was revealed
by the old and new technologies.
Question: I like very much the models you have of the heart and lungs. Would you
explain how they were made please?
Annie Cattrell: Borosilicate pyrex glass, that you would use in a laboratory, is blown
into. The idea of blowing and creating something which is made of air and which is
about air is interesting.
Question: You hand-made them?
Annie Cattrell: Yes.
Question: How did you acquire that level of skill?
Annie Cattrell: Sometimes I get help to do the bits I can’t do, like the central column
of the trachea which was quite large in scale and had to be worked on a lathe. I find it
important to do a lot myself, so I put in the hours to learn. I can feel a big learning
session coming on with computing, which doesn’t fill me with awe because I am very
interested in what can happen and how it can happen. It’s a new thing – I am usually
hands on and not someone who is behind a computer – and for me this is one of the
most exciting parts of rapid-prototyping technology and the laser technology I have
been using with the sunshine strips.
Question: Where are those lungs now?
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Annie Cattrell: Sold. I made an edition of three sets of lungs. One is with Bob Geldof
and the other with Damien Hirst’s accountant and business manager, Frank Dunphy.
So installing the work is quite interesting.
Question: Did you sell them at your show?
Annie Cattrell: Yes, I did.
Question: With the picture of the MRI images of the brain, you chose not to isolate,
in a way, the active parts of the brain. There are techniques available to produce the
brain itself in a transparent resin and have the other parts of the brain coloured which
may have provided a bit more of a reference for people to look at. I know it was a
piece of art, but you tend to lose which part of the brain is actually active without the
rest of the brain around it. Did anyone bring that up in conversation when they were
discussing the work with you? Did anyone ask, ‘Well, which bit is that?’ I mean, you
can’t see it, because it is an isolated area and does not have the characteristic shape
of the brain around it. Using different resins you could have had the lot – the brain
and the active areas inside.
Annie Cattrell: You make decisions, such as how much to reveal, along the way and
I felt this was not a teaching model but was more about the concept of the brain as a
physical entity. You begin to connect the three-dimensionality of the rest of the brain
by walking around and by looking. I see your point, but it does fits together; it is more
of a jigsaw really.
Question: It may not have been your intention, but half the people who went round
must have thought it was great, and half might have said I can’t quite see what that
bit is. I see the three areas that are active for smell, but can’t relate them to myself.
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Annie Cattrell: There will always be people who want things more clearly defined,
but I like everything reduced as much as possible. I like to edit to the barest
essentials, as in the sunshine strips. It takes time and the viewer has to make a
greater effort and imagine more.
Question: Perhaps that is the problem of being an engineer and not an artist?
Question: For information, there is a relatively new technique – I am not sure how
new, but I have seen it over the last couple of years – whereby you can fire a laser
into crystal glass.
Answer: I know. I found it in Germany. I thought of it in relationship to the 3D and the
plotting for some of my ideas, but the trouble is it doesn’t go beyond 20 x something
at the moment, and that is not big enough for me. I have looked into it. I think in
Hamleys you can get scanned and have a small-scale portrait made. John Wigley
had one done; characteristically, he wore his hat and had his whole head scanned
from the outside. I like that and think it is really interesting. I like the idea of the anti-
gravity as well, the fact you suspend things in space, see them in the round and
know, whether or not you are projecting into space and using mirrors, there is a
whole aspect of it. There is lightness to this technology and an economy of means –
you don’t have any extras in it.
Question: With the lungs, it was very interesting to hear about the appropriateness
of the process, the blowing to produce a piece of work that was about breath and
breathing. In a lot of your other work, that physical engagement with the process
seems integral, or at least adds an important dimension to the understanding and
reading of the piece. Given that, I am interested to hear you say more about rapid
prototyping, because what the process is doing, essentially, is distancing you.
Obviously there are ways in which you engage with the computer, but the linkage of
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physical process, particularly given the sort of imagery you use and your interests, is
quite important. I wonder if you think there is any risk in moving over to rapid
prototyping?
Answer: I think for me, it is certainly about the brain work. If I were to carry on doing
work about the body, which is quite likely in rapid prototyping, it is a matter of
expense, and scale, and so forth, and about needing help to do it because I work a
great deal with scientists and am reliant on a lot of people to fit pieces together. I like
the fineness and intricacy of rapid prototyping, something very difficult to achieve by
other means. It is difficult to build things and have that sense of how they are
structured, like the bits. With the brain work it was very important for me to create
something that was accurate; to take the scans into reality, so to speak, and back
into rapid prototyping or back into another material would have corrupted it slightly. I
like the idea you can’t get inside the head of a living body and am not particularly
interested in dissection, and for it to come out through that channel felt right to me. It
may be rapid prototyping is only appropriate, in my mind, for that work and I never
use that again. But I don’t think so. I am really interested in the way the body and the
mind work together, and in the senses we experience through our fingertips or toes,
or whatever else, right into the brain. I would like to work on these kinds of things,
which again would be a lot easier in rapid prototyping than anything else.
Question: Art science has only recently been sanctioned officially by the funding
agencies, etc., and become a recognised genre. Could you say something to
articulate what attracts you to work with scientists?
Annie Cattrell: I suppose, without wishing to sound pompous, I started before it
became fashionable. I was doing it as a student at Glasgow School of Art from 1989-
84; I was going to the Hunterian and looking at bodies then. It was difficult to find a
way, however, as I didn’t want to replicate them. This sort of work has always been
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part of the way I think and how I look at the world, so it was fantastic from the
nineties onwards when funding became available from which I could benefit; in some
ways it is becoming incredibly competitive and getting more difficult now. The Helen
Chadwick Fellowship and the Gulbenkian funding have been great. The only thing I
would say is that the whole idea of collaboration isn’t ever really fifty-fifty. I like to
keep a firm grip on the steering wheel when collaborating and usually I go into
scientific institutions where I am one in a very well-oiled team of people who all work
full time in a particular place at a particular desk, or whatever, in a particular research
group.
I have been very fortunate to have a series of residences and fellowships and I think I
need to stand back a bit now from that direct collaborative process. Says she who is
just starting something with Microsoft – although this is different because it is more to
do with technology and so forth. It is an interesting area. People write applications for
grants and almost predict what they will do. I see this as a problem that needs to be
inbuilt into those applications – the chance element and what might happen rather
than predicting too much in the beginning at the grant stage.
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Bruce Gernand
Geometry is the link from my non-digital to my digital work. I want to talk about my
persistent relationship between the digital (or virtual) and the material. Much of my
work has focussed on and tried to define these two areas, and explored how they
interrelate. I will start this talk with rapid-prototype work, then move on to projects
where I have developed a technique like rapid prototyping that is more craft based.
At certain points I shall be practical and describe exactly how some of these things
are made.
My first rapid-prototype work, a stereolithograph epoxy resin, came out of the CALM
project with which Keith Brown was involved. I had never worked with computers
before and indeed I didn’t do any of the modelling; someone did it for me. Then I
discovered there is something worse than sitting in front of a computer all day and
that is sitting next to someone who is sitting in front of a computer all day. I decided,
having to come to this incredibly late, I had to learn it myself. In virtual modelling
surfaces are permeable and the issue of intersection called Boolean intersection
became interesting for me. Very simply, by taking an organic form and a geometric
shape, bringing them together and separating them, I made this little plaster model
which showed how a blade had cut into one shape and where lumpy shapes had left
their imprint. There is an absent shape, and, in the sculpture, you are dealing with
these two objects. However, there is also a third element which is implied and,
initially, this was made into a larger piece, commissioned by ‘Sculpture at
Goodwood’. At that point, the whole material process begins to kick in again.
This concept of the Boolean intersection where one object leaves an imprint in
another was something I began to pursue. I was involved in a project at the
European Ceramics Work Centre, Holland, where a lot of my work on rapid-prototype
models and moulds for ceramics and porcelain involved the intersection of forms in a
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way that would be incredibly difficult to achieve in real space, but which had a kind of
odd existence in our space because of their generation in a digital space.
With my programme I am able to unfold objects; I can construct them and unfold
them, like peeling an orange. I spread out the ‘peel’, print it on my little desktop
printer, take it to a photocopy place and have it blown up to the right dimensions.
These right dimensions are, in a sense, something larger than a normal prototype
object, otherwise it would be more appropriate perhaps, barring cost, to do it as a
rapid prototype.
With the three-part Boolean intersection, the middle object is a product or progeny of
two larger forms. I have the object and the unfold of the NURBS [non-uniform rational
B-spline] generated object and it for me it is more about being a family than ‘this is a
computer-generated piece of sculpture’.
In my series Serpents and Snails, when learning the three-dimensional modelling
programme, I was working at such a basic level, nowhere near the sophistication of
our colleague Keith Brown, and I took very simple archetypal forms, like a curve and
an arc, and generated variations. I used the torus in a very simple way, where the
section is equivalent to the path that the section follows. The shape may be
elongated or squashed, and follow a serpentine path, so there is a notion of
morphing and you have the torus, archetypal geometric structures. It is so simple in a
way, because I am just struggling to learn and making as I go. How does this work? If
I press this button, what happens?
In some models, I take the torus and the serpentine shapes and cut layers of
polystyrene with a little hot wire device I made myself. I use photocopies on mount
card, hot-glued together. It is Blue Peter technology meets cyber world. I take the
unfold of the torus shape and the contour slices for the serpentine shape. In a typical
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traditional sculptor’s way of working I use moulds. In the serpentine mould, you can
see the striations, you can see the facets. This generated the work Serpents and
Snails with the moulds as the basis for making variations. Just two moulds began to
proliferate a series of works. For example, one of the pieces was a Klein bottle, which
again is a characteristic virtual object, but partly modelled in clay. But in order for it to
be seen as a Klein bottle, I had to cut it in half, thereby destroying the integrity of the
surface. Do you know the Moebius strip? If you take a strip of paper and twist it, draw
a pencil line round so it doesn’t have an inside or an outside, it is continuous. A Klein
bottle is a volumetric version of the Moebius strip, and if you wanted to paint the
inside blue and the outside red, you couldn’t because it would all be the same
surface with no inside and no outside.
When responding to commission structures like the CALM project, an arts and
technology initiative, the residency at the European Ceramics Works Centre, and my
commission from the Chelsea Physic Garden, we always have to remember the
social factors in the generation of work. The Chelsea Physic Garden is the prototype
of our western botanic gardens so everything there comes from somewhere else.
Rather than bring plants into reference, I wanted to import a kind of landscape back
into the Gardens, reflect the fact that things come from somewhere else and use a
sort of palette. While modelling the work, it was fantastic to have a little competence
with the computer as I was fascinated by the notion of landscape but thought it would
be terribly ‘twee’ to model by hand. Thankfully the computer was there to take my
hand away and I pursued the concept of land formation having a correspondence
with botanic development. Pinna-Geologico – ‘pinna’ meaning when plants branch
out and also, here, a geological equivalent – was unfired and when it went into the
Chelsea Physic Garden it sat there for 3 months. Then the weather took over. It was
a temporary piece. The sun and the rain had their effects, eroding the objects over
time.
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One of the things that caused me to become interested in computer modelling was
reading architectural theory because I was dissatisfied with theory about sculpture. I
got into the whole issue of meta forms and smooth modelling, which is fantastic to do
on the computer, but there is always the issue of how to get it out. After a while I had
a reaction against it and thought I would make just incredibly simple things and
distort them, because one of the excellent things about the 3D modelling is the
distortions that you can get – very precise and particular deformations. To deform an
abstract shape, however, is just another deformation so I found myself, having
worked in a very abstract way with sculpture for years, suddenly having a sensible
reason to become referential and have a representational form. I chose to use small
architectural – they are not really architectural – generic ecclesiastical or
administrative structures which I then deformed to give a kind of perspective.
Perspective always shifts in consequence of the view point; these objects have their
own perspective already and so are a bit ambiguous and odd.
For a wall piece, a dome, for example, the distortion is not as extreme as in real life.
With the whole issue of perspective and our experience of something large, we know
perspective lines recede and diminish away, yet we experience buildings looming
over us as well. There is an ambiguity of how our perception accommodates large
things like buildings and I was interested to explore this in sculpture. For me
everything comes back to the object.
While working on one project for a museum in Tornio, Finland, I took a ground plan of
the museum, then went on the web and got a tiny little photograph of the elevation of
the museum. The idea for the project was that the group of artists involved would
respond to the site. I focused on the museum and did several distortions. I took an
angle that was not a right angle and make it into one so it skewed all of the other
angles of the building. Then I deformed it once more so that the object, which would
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be in Tornio, would lean towards England where it was made. I worked using an
overhead projector to project the unfolded version and made several quick hot-glue
models to decide which would work best.
Festina Lente (make haste slowly) is a great Renaissance motto. I have been
interested in neo-platonic philosophy for sometime, as well as the idea of an emblem
being able to have visual symbols to embody concepts. Festina Lente is a paradox
and relates a lot to what we talk about nowadays in terms of the computer and cyber
space, the virtual and the digital, being incredibly fast and so on. My feeling is it might
look that way, but it is not. I used the fable of the tortoise and the hare to develop this
theme at another residency in Holland where there was a foundry and a printmaking
facility and I was able to explore two dimensional print-outs in a more concerted and
serious way. The tortoise shell was the perfect vehicle for my unfold faceting
technique, and the hare, being much quicker and more slippery, was made out of
polystyrene. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined taking out a bag of clay and
modelling a hare. The irony and the curious thing about practice is that you get
involved with the computer, you project this incredibly sophisticated technological
advance you are going to make, and what do you do? You end up making animals.
In modelling animals on the computer, though, you are not so much constructing as
growing. The hare, in particular, is done with a technique called patch modelling. You
go back and forth between a cage and a patch, but it really made me think more
about what the digital space is because initially you make the assumption it is a
Cartesian space, x,y,z co-ordinates infinitely extended but empty, and it is that. But
you read further into Deleuzian philosophy and you understand it is alive and is in
space because everything is calculable and so on. In growing these animals, I began
to think of it as a kind of womb, a nurturing, metaphoric space. You have the process
of going from the model into the mould, of being made and a kind of tortoise emerges
in wax out of the mould. It is all part of the traditional sculptor’s process. Having
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made the wax I would play on it with a hot air gun and splash on more wax, just to
make the form more interesting and slippery.
Then all these repressed issues, like animism, began to surface. We are much too
sophisticated to believe in animistic issues, yet I am sure you curse at your computer
and kick your car. Indeed, if you are a sculptor, don’t tell me you don’t talk to your
work. You do have this relationship. Working with these representations, I let this
happen a little more and did a screen print about the evolution of the tortoise and the
hare, and they are actually having the conversation. They spent a long time getting to
this point – months of modelling on the computer, surviving in digital space, then
emerging as polystyrene and cardboard, being made into wax and finally getting
poured into metal and polished up – and what happens? The hare wants to escape
straight away. It wants to get back to digital space. There is a narrative going on, a
narrative embedded in the emblematic structure. I did a pair, split hare because
hares are schizophrenic, you see them running this way and that, and the other
tortoise is in the form of a Chinese three-legged cauldron, a ting, with faux mercury in
the bottom – again little alchemical references going on. The digital print was based
on surimono, a Japanese technique of folding and unfolding, so it is actually in six
parts. It is a way of structuring a narrative that is not like storyboards. At the top it
shows me dreaming. I’m dreaming I’m a tortoise and a hare; it shows the studio I was
working in and the text of a conversation between the tortoise and the hare, and their
journey and origination in cyberspace and their coming into the real, material world.
Believe me, I am so surprised that I made this kind of work, but there we are.
Still working with the digital and the print, another of my works is called How to Give
Sharp Edges to a Smooth Stone. Again, it involves that notion of wonderful smooth
modelling you can achieve on the computer in digital space and the question of how
to get it out into real space. In my case, I use techniques which immediately distort
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and degrade the pristine quality of the virtual. I show a piece of tracing paper and it is
all crumpled up because, of course, you get too frustrated to make this work. The
iconic frontal sculpture is the sphinx. On the computer I grew the sphinx and then
distorted it so it was at an angle. It is shown, as though a relief, and the contour slice
technique mirrors the erosion of the actual stone at Giza.
Question: You mentioned faux mercury for the tortoise and said it wasn’t important. I
just wonder why it is there if it isn’t important?
Bruce Gernard: It is not important for you to know all the alchemical references; for
example the stand the hare is on is the colour of cinnabar, and cinnabar is the oxide
of mercury. Daoists ate cinnabar thinking they would become immortal, then died.
The issue of my reference to Festine Lente and neo-platonic renaissance philosophy
is about reading works at progressively deeper levels. Initially Botticelli’s Primavera is
a painting about spring, but there are a lot of deeper esoteric levels at which it can be
read, if you are so inclined or interested.
Question: You spoke earlier about the influence of rapid prototyping and the way in
which it had, in a sense, generated a way of working. Do you think it generated a
look as opposed to a way of working? It is the layering I am thinking of in particular.
Bruce Gernard: It’s not so much the rapid prototyping as the computer modelling.
Because I am, I suppose, a traditional sculptor in that I am concerned with material
and allow processes to influence the evolution of a form or a work, the whole idea of
working in this virtual space in the first instance began to challenge a lot of my
assumptions about how to work. That said, they also somehow reinforced the way I
was working; because of my limited skill and the fact I can’t dedicate more time to it, I
find it quite frustrating and feel myself a bit of a novice. Yet it is not just a tool – there
is this space in which you are working. Normally you think of a tool as your Stanley
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knife and you’re cutting here, or brushing your teeth with a toothbrush. With computer
modelling, there is this extra feature which is a spatial feature and it is happening in
there, in a space which is not this space. I think that’s very interesting and it got me
to think a lot about space and its relationship to the sculptural object.
Question: You play around with perspective a lot in some of the pieces which you
have shown. This is interesting to me because perspective is essentially a pictorial
device and I am struck that, not only in your work but in some of the other work we
have seen today, this has been a strategy employed by people who have taken up
the computer distortion, whether perspectival or through some other distortion
techniques. I wonder whether you could say a little bit more about how and why you
do that?
Bruce Gernard: If you have a very, very abstract form, let’s say one of Keith’s
distorted toruses, and you distort it again, it is not going to read it as distortion is it?
So this issue of the distortion wanting to be recognised leads me to making objects
that have some kind of representation or quality – in this instance, buildings. And the
fact of perspective in relationship to buildings seems to be obvious and something to
pursue. I don’t want to make architectural models. What interests me is this kind of
ambiguity in recognising something as perspectival and yet, as you say, perspective
is pictorial and, as I said earlier, a consequence of shifting viewpoints within the
environment. What’s it like for an object to possess its own perspective? That is
interesting for me because then it re-enforces its identity as an object in some way. It
is not a systematic thing, as with Robert Lazzarini who replicates and distorts objects;
my approach is different from that.
Question: I have one little follow up question – a practical one. Those ‘unwrappings’
look to me like UV maps, and I was wondering how you generate them? I mean UV
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maps in terms of ‘unwrapping’ an object, in terms of applying a surface to it and then
re-applying it. Is that where they came from?
Bruce Gernard: No, I push a button called ‘unfold’. It is particular to my programme,
Form Z. It unfolds in different ways depending on where on the object, but it is that
simple.
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Plenary Session
Heidi Reitmaier: I have a question for the panel. It’s to do with one of the things
Christiane said early on in her talk when she spoke about the idea of process and the
possibilities of experimentation in moving, and something David touched on when he
said rapid prototyping allows you to correct mistakes and also to experiment. There
was this idea about correction. Someone in the audience was talking about the
notion of experimentation and its possibilities. Christiane spoke about the fact artists
have freedom, or possibly more freedom, and what that might mean. I just wanted
some of the panellists to comment on whether there is an issue about expression in
creativity in terms of technology, because it seems to be thought artists can still
express themselves. At lunch I heard someone talking about the singular notion of
the object expressing, artists expressing themselves through an object. What I am
asking is how new technology might allow but also disallow creative processes, and
where it can be both incredibly liberating but also potentially a hindrance.
Keith Brown: With specific regard to rapid prototyping it is like a ‘process
interruptus’. You do this modelling on the computer, you get really involved with it,
then you give the file to this machine and it is almost like a ready-made – what do
you do next? In my experience, there is this interrupting moment because the
material and the scale for the most part are pretty unsympathetic unless you are into
it. For me it is unsympathetic and I don’t particularly respond to that potato-starchy
stuff, or epoxy resin, or whatever. So what do you do with it? There is a kind of
interrupted break to that process and then in some way, at least for me, you have to
crank up and treat it like a found object or something and begin to develop it further,
unless of course you have a more capacious conceptualisation and then you can
take it. That is my subjective experience. It is an interruption; it is a kind of simulation,
not quite what you want, but it is very interesting, because it is always interesting to
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see something that comes out of the digital realm and which is very much a spatial
thing. For sculptors, it is almost essential to have the thing in front of you; anything up
until then is a fantasy. The virtual space is a fantasy space in relationship to the
object that comes out in terms of rapid prototyping.
Christiane Paul: I think we are looking at shifts and changes in the process of
expression. First of all, many sculptors have told me they focus more on the
conceptual level. With the process of the design something might happen in sketches
or paper, but you start from scratch doing another sketch. Artists have sketch books
filled with drawings while, in this case, you are working with one virtual model that
you distort, stretch, change in many possible ways and some people find it liberating
not to have to deal with the finite aspect of the object, which I think with other
materials is much more radical. So first of all I think you have to distinguish the level
of computer-aided design and then the manufacturing, and I would agree totally there
is this interruption in the process, also depending on how you use it. I know many
sculptors who had access to 3D printers throughout a fellowship for example, and
they were the ones actually using the printer, pushing the buttons and working with
the machine. That again is a different level from sending off a file, so I think there are
changes on various levels and it depends very much on how you engage with the
material in any aspect.
Heidi Reitmaier: I was going to pick up on the point Christiane made about the
difference between tools and media. Up to this point, a lot of the discussion has been
about new forms, new articulations in terms of objects and I am wondering whether it
is facilitating new forms of practice, just slightly different concept. We look at the new
forms of practice in terms of new technology and we have the interactive and so we
think of Thomson and Croquette and we can think of artists who work on the net or in
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new media, but I am asking whether or not we think there is something else, or a
continuation of that.
Christiane Paul: I think there is absolutely something else, even if we end up with an
object – I think it is this kind of more process-orientated working on the one hand,
going through mutations in the software in your process and the things that many of
the presentations pointed out, that simply couldn’t have been done before. And just
as an additional comment on the discussions about perspective we had before, we
have our perspective: we are bound by our way of seeing and perceiving space. The
computer isn’t. Computers can introduce distortions of perspective or offer new
perspectives that are very hard for us to see and, when it comes to the sculptures,
even to perceive because our brain was not designed to see that way. These are
things we probably couldn’t even imagine. They couldn’t be done without a computer
in this way and I think that allows for new ways of expression. Also, I think Keith’s
work makes that obvious – there are types of forms achieved through mutations and
folding the object in on itself – if you wanted to do that, just from a mathematical point
of view, it would be very, very hard. I am not saying it can’t be done, but it would
probably take a massive amount of calculation even to conceive it conceptually while
a computer can do that easily. I am not saying the computer is doing the work, but it
opens up new possibilities for expression.
Keith Brown: I think you need to be able to understand the perimeters with which
you are working in doing that, and certainly the way I work with the software is as a
found material. I play with it and push it around until it breaks down and you find out
where its edges and parameters are, and somehow you accept those as its
parameters and work within them. However, you are quite right, nearly every digital
sculptor I am aware of who has made a statement about it says he or she couldn’t
produce such work by any other means, so to that extent it is liberating. And I think to
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some extent it is actually bringing about a new order of object, certainly in terms of
sculpture, maybe not in the terms of biology or the way one’s body grows or
something like that. Heidi, going back to your initial question – it was quite a long
question. Brings out more freedom in whom? Artists have more freedom than
engineers or designers or project designers. I think to some extent we form our own
briefs, so we have that freedom, we are not working for our masters necessarily, we
have freedom to do what we like, as long as you can afford the computer, of course.
The other thing is that I express myself through the object. For me it is more a
question of the objects expressing themselves through me. I see the cyber
environment almost as an Aladdin’s cave, where I go in and explore and open boxes
and treasure chests and look around and find things. I bring out those things either
visually on the monitor, or visually through print, or integral imaging or rapid
prototypes, and simply place them in the world for others to see and make of them
what they will. In the first instance, I am editing and finding things that fascinate me
as a sculptor of 40-years experience of many objects. I don’t know what the next
generations are likely to do with this technology and I think I am bound by my own
history in some way and bring a lot of baggage with me too – which I don’t make any
apologies for either. I see it as the objects expressing themselves through me in
some rather odd way, and Bruce talks to his work, so …
Bruce Gernard: One of the great things about a material object is that it does force a
clarity about what you can do, because you could permeate endlessly in virtual
space. Why? Because you can. Which one is better? Is this one better? How do you
get to make a judgement? That is where it becomes potentially very, very difficult.
Whereas as soon as you have ‘outed’ this process and ground it in this kind of
material, there is another tension being brought into play. So I think artists have to
find that rigour within the virtual space, which is what I think you are doing, whereas I
am not; I just say get it out as quickly as possible and begin to play with it there.
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Think of architects, because a lot of these modelling programmes are developed
mainly for architects. We all know Frank Gehry, and Greg Lynn and his blob
architecture. Isn’t it marvellous that this age, like the Renaissance and its
development of perspective, is coming into a new world. Isn’t it fantastic now we can
calculate the dimensions of this fold, and so on. For architects, this is tremendous,
but for sculptors? We have been doing that for a millennium. It is how the model
relates for sculptors. Often you will be reading and become involved in the discourse
perpetrated by people who don’t make things – they design things and give them to
other people – the engineers, construction project managers. So, if you are
interested and begin to read on a theoretical level issues about computer modelling,
etc., remember it is always from the point of view of people who don’t make things.
Christiane Paul: Not all of them. It leads to the question of software ultimately, and
software is always a cultural and coded construct; a lot of it commercially encoded if
you look at the products that are there. You are right – if you look at Form Z, or
Computer Aided Design in general, these are softwares made, usually, for architects
for very pragmatic usages and the tools one uses in the menu bars were originally
done for something else. They have a different encoded agenda. But there are also
many artists who write their own software for doing this type of work and that is
probably an interesting thing to watch in the future – the sculptors who have actually
written their own software for creating the forms, not necessarily bound by these
encoded constructs handed down by the industry, the commercial applications.
Question: I have been quite interested in this idea of the new order of objects that
has been proposed today and am feeling a bit like a non-believer; sceptical of this
new order of objects. I think my scepticism arises because a lot of what I have seen I
know has a long historical precedence, particularly in the repetitive use of
anamorphism, which obviously came from Leonardo and is derived from the
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Renaissance. Also the very complex, intricate forms which Keith is making and
thinking of, and those almost impossible sculptural forms made by the Chinese
carved in ivory. They have the same stunning aesthetic result and so it seems that
the digital, which in some senses should be an non-Cartesian space, is a re-thinking
of time and has actually resulted in works that are very Cartesian and traditional. So I
am wondering whether the claims that processes affect the results so profoundly are
actually misguided. I have been thinking about the microwave cooker. That
technology is a completely different way of cooking – what you get is slightly more
soggy pastry than the pasty you got from the oven, and does it really matter that the
pasty has been made in an entirely different way? It has affected the final form, but
does that matter conceptually? Also, the notion of the virtual that is being used is in
some ways still a Cartesian notion of the virtual. I know Bruce mentioned Deleuze,
where the virtual exists as a splitting of time between past and present so is
simultaneously there, rather than the idea of a realm distinct from a real that distinctly
exists. This is a set of complex issues but there are a number of questions over
whether this really is a new realm of objects or not.
Christiane Paul: First of all, for decades there have been so many discussions
about virtual space and so many books have been written. It is impossible to
summarise all of it. The space of the computer – there is no doubt about it at this
point – is a Cartesian space; this is how the calculations are being done and there
are many, many people working on redefining that space and really proposing
completely new notions of it. That is just one aspect of it, so there are experiments
there. But if you look at modelling software, if you look at games and how modelling
is done, how 3D worlds are modelled, it is Cartesian space – all of it. I don’t think this
is necessarily related to what we are talking about. It is also a matter of context. I am
not saying Robert Lazzarini’s works, for example, completely redefine something;
they play with perspective and I think it would be very hard for a sculptor to do this,
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many people say almost impossible, without these tools. Of course it is embedded in
a long art-historical tradition, I have absolutely no doubt about it. Then coming back
to context, I think probably the average art audience, or 99% of it, would look at the
sculptures and say they are nice. They probably wouldn’t see they have been made
by use of digital technologies, and as far as I am concerned that’s fine. It is just that
for someone who is working in the field, a curator or another artist, there is a lot more
to the whole process. I see how on and off the medium these sculptures are. They
wouldn’t be possible in any other way. We are talking about subtleties – I would
never claim there is a revolution, because in the end you can only revolutionise the
object so much. You cannot, in the physically manifest space, transcend physical
laws, but the process of time forms. I see, for example, in Keith’s work something
that would have been very, very hard to achieve and I doubt he could conceptualise
these things without the use of the tool. Is it so important that people see that, or not?
It depends where you are coming from. I don’t think it is for the average person going
to see the work of art. Certainly it is for me and for others, but also I don’t want to
engage in hype: here is the new tool that will revolutionise everything. This is what
the dotcom boom was based upon and what the industry is trying to push when it
comes to digital technologies. I think it is important to look at the finer points and see
how they really innovate or change things, or introduce important shifts.
Keith Brown: Your reference to complex Chinese ivory carving, or maybe 17th-
century Florentine carving, is incredibly complex, and my work has been likened to
that, most recently in this issue’s Sculpture magazine – but that is not the point for
me. I think the point is very much as Christiane said, that you are able spontaneously
to conceive of and interact with the typologies within the cyber environment. For me
there are extra dimensionalities. That is debatable. It is where time comes in and
where other dimensions are likely to enter. An example of this might be the two-
dimensional matchstick man drawn on a piece of paper and if you draw a circle round
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it, that creature can’t get out of the circle. But if you up it to a third dimension, it can
walk across. I think moving from the third dimension to the fourth dimension or fifth
dimension, including time too, is where objects can pass through each other, and you
have not been able to do that before. John Maine’s sculpture, for instance, where you
take two prisms and collide them together, that is ‘doable’; but if you take two kidneys
or two hearts and try to do that, or what Roger was doing with his spheres, it
becomes incredibly complex and it is not just the complexity of the making, it is the
revelations that occur at the conceptual level when you are interacting with the cyber
environment. I think, in terms of the Cartesian space, a cube is a cube is cube, and if
it’s a virtual cube, it has 6 sides and angles of 90˚ and if it does not, it is not a cube.
This is the same as a cube in the real world, a cube is a cube is a cube. Having said
that you can transcend this to an extent in terms of the manipulation of those
typologies, and when you are working it is very much a conceptual activity – you are
interacting with it in real time with the computer and you are discovering possibilities.
I have been making sculptures for 40 years and have worked with an awful lot of
different materials: clay, stone, sawdust, glass, metal, plastics, all sorts, and you
cannot manipulate those materials in the same way that you can manipulate entities
in the cyber environment. Bruce’s Cloud and Star; the ‘Boolean’, that form in the
centre, would be extremely hard to calculate and determine by other means. To that
extent they are objects: they exist and are manifest in the world, and they have to
comply to some degree to the law of physics. For me, to another extent, they are a
new order of object because there is a new freedom to allow you to interact with
them and export them as actual objects back into the world, and this is rather
extraordinary because it has become a two-way thing.
Question: Is complexity the only conceptual point?
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Keith Brown: No, it is not just the complexity itself but the possibilities that occur
because of it. There was a piece I discussed towards the end of my paper which was
an ABS white plastic piece that I had said I put a lattice work around. Now, that
started off as a wire frame with vertices with spheres wrapped around, so every
module within the composition was a sphere – there might have been two hundred of
them, and they were manipulated in such a way that the forces I applied caused each
to be affected consecutively by the one next to it in a rather extraordinary way, in a
way materials wouldn’t normally affect each other. The sorts of forces and energies
one uses to articulate those forms produce rhythms and harmonies I don’t think you
can actually achieve by other means. That might not mean anything to you, I don’t
know. Are you a sculptor?
No.
Keith Brown: Just curious to know.
Bruce Gernard: I think it is a really interesting set of questions. It is important, but
important in the same way as if you are working in photography and you are
choosing silver nitrate black and white in relation to digital, that is an incredibly
important distinction. So I think …..
Question: You say that but if you take your 35mm roll, you get back identical
photographs that are produced digitally so nobody knows the difference. Is it just a
device?
Bruce Gernard: Some people know the difference. When we look at a work, we are
hovering between projecting whatever it is we want to project onto the work and
interrogating the work. There is always this balance and the more sophisticated your
perception and questioning becomes, the more these issues become important. They
become important for the spectator in the way that they have for the office. That is
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presumably one of the functions of the object there, to make neutral locations. I
locate myself towards you in relation to the work you have made, so I think it is
important. What I was trying to talk about in the Festine Lente work, the Hare and the
Tortoise, was that I began to feel empathy with the space from which they came and
before that Cartesian space was a very frustrating space. But through the process of
continuing to work, I am on a path where I can explore these metaphor possibilities in
that space and so, when I show the work, I try to show it within a not too dissimilar
spatial context that evokes the space around the work as well. If the Hare and the
Tortoise hadn’t been digital, I wouldn’t be interested. Now when a spectator looks at
them, they think yes, clearly a tortoise and a hare, and they think of a race between
the tortoise and the hare. Then they might go a little bit further and ask why the hare
is aluminium and the tortoise bronze. And why the hare is sliced with that peculiar
effect. From that kind of interrogation, an understanding of the work begins to extend,
I think, like with any other work of art. The more you attempt, the more it reveals
itself. And a lot of that revelation is kind of technical – technical versus oil painting.
Question: One aspect of the technology that hasn’t been discussed this afternoon,
and I must admit I am quite surprised, is tele-manufacturing possibilities. The idea
that you can manufacture something remotely. In fact, to Bruce it almost seemed like
an inconvenience that you had to do this and be separated from your file. But to
introduce that possibility to a large network, to me, opens up a whole load of
possibilities in terms of interventions and collaborations and relational art possibilities
and social sculpture, etc.
Bruce Gernard: For me, I’m not interested at all, but I understand what you are
saying.
Christiane Paul: Conceptually it is an interesting thing to think about and people
have been talking about it for so long, but nobody seems interested in exploring it.
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Depending on what you mean by tele-manufacturing, there is so much happening in
the realm of network art and network communications and networks are
communication media, and there seems to be a clash again between the ‘virtual’ and
the physically manifest world. Yes, you can produce a sculpture instantaneously, but
why? The necessity of why you are transporting these forms as a network is the
question here. Other than that, tele-manufacturing in the straight sense of the word is
also that you send off your files and have an object produced remotely, or that it
happens on that level anyway. I don’t see it happening that much in a networking
environment and would speculate this is because it just doesn’t seem to make as
much sense as people meeting within this networking environment and virtual world.
Roger Clark: I think one thing is when you have a piece of work you want to produce
it in real space; the other thing is how it is going to be placed in the space it is shown.
If you do something, send off a file and put it in another space, they could send you a
video image of where it is in the space, but the only way you can know how it is going
to work in that space is to be there. You have to feel its presence and you have to
know how to place it. So I would be very uncomfortable sending a file somewhere,
letting it be produced and just put out. You don’t know what they are going to do – it
might be put on a plinth which could drive you mad, or in the wrong place or the
wrong way up. I would have to know and it may be the problem with this idea.
Heidi Reitmaier: But isn’t there a way, and this may or may not be what Bruce is
talking about, when we think about the Sixties and objects that were manufactured
then? If you went to a gallery, endlessly reproduced an object and handed it out, in a
sense what you could do is subvert a commercial aspect, which is slightly different
from relational sculpture, but you could subvert a commercial aspect to distribute
objects that are not real until they are downloaded and made.
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Christiane Paul: This is happening, but it also begs a question as so much of this is
going on within the networked virtual environment – pieces being distributed,
downloaded, on mobile devices, shared between people – which offers many more
possibilities than actually creating something physical; and that is where I think it
doesn’t make too much sense. Exactly as you said, physical objects are also bound
to a space, and unless you are talking about de-materialisation in the first place as
something that can be discarded or destroyed, there also seems to be a tension here
or a conundrum that cannot be easily solved.
Heidi Reitmaier: Were you talking about something else?
Kind of. I am interested in the possibilities of interruption and interfering with other
people’s ideas. Sabotage, that kind of stuff
Keith Brown: James Stewart Prison [don’t think this name is right!!! Please check.]
started a project a couple of years ago when he sent an STL around digital sculptors
to interact with it, change it and send it back to him, and he would make it in the
prison labs. That is approaching what you are talking about, I think, but he was
sending the digital sculptures to people who understood the software and could
interact with the work. As the software gets easier, it would be more possible for the
lay person to do that, so you could have those sorts of collaborations. It is a bit like
the game ‘Exquisite Corpse’; you fold a piece of paper and draw the next bit, and you
get some odd thing at the other end that’s a product of everybody’s input. I wouldn’t
like to enter into that necessarily. There are notions of authorship somewhere.
Bruce Gernard: I wouldn’t mind, as a lark – it’s fun. All of these things are interesting
to do because they are available. You want to send a file to New Mexico, why not?
Christiane Paul: Again this is happening everywhere. Look at what is happening in
games, in 3D worlds, where people create their own sculptures in shared
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environments and collaborate on them. Why would I need Bruce to send me his
sculpture to manipulate? What is so interesting about that, rather than doing this from
scratch with dozens of people and interacting with them? It is just a matter of artistic
intention.
Heidi Reitmaier: Having worked temporarily for a year with iStorm, the number of
collaborations we did with artists were in a sense, creative industries. Those people
who work between the art world and the commercial industries in terms of gaming
are like those at ‘Soda’. And we did actually create, we used ‘Exquisite Corpse’ and
created a gallery on which people could draw and it would be sent round. There is
something called ‘Sodaplay’, I don’t know if people have seen it, but it has fantastic
projects and ‘Soda’ is an interesting group that makes, in a sense, these virtual
spaces on which people then collaborate. They also sell, and someone was talking
about this, the repetition in the engineering industry. You have to ensure when you
produce something you can keep repeating it over and over. When you deal with
something like ‘Soda’, it is interesting is how they hold on to what they call the IPR
[intellectual property rights]. They sell only bits of the programme and hold back
others because those bits are obviously worth a lot of money and they can re-use
them in making new forms and new projects. This is something Christiane said
earlier about economic viability in the marketplace, about repetitions and what you
hold back in terms of function.
Question: I am interested because I think everybody who has talked today has
shown, to a greater or lesser degree, serious ambivalence towards technologies, the
computer as a tool. I am interested for people to talk more about the relationship they
feel they have towards the computer because, on the one hand, we are being asked
to believe it is fantastically exciting and hugely productive and, on the other, and I
think this has been demonstrated in some of the comments made today, there is this
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deep suspicion of it. The getting the objects out is first and foremost quite interesting
to me. Why? There are certain economic reasons I can imagine why it is a good idea
to get the objects out of the computer and into the galleries. It confers onto the
computer objects a status they simply don’t have on the computer. I would be
interested to hear more about what people think about the computer and their
relationship with it.
Christiane Paul: No deep suspicion on my part at all. I love it. I got into art because
of this. It is more about addressing perspectives because it is an area embedded in
so many fields. It came essentially out of the military industrial complex. There is
commerce, there is industry; these contexts are embedded and all of them are
pushing their own agendas and sometimes you just have this incredible hype
surrounding it and, of course I am coming more from the arts perspective or the
academic perspective, it’s about getting it right. I am not interested in what
corporations are trying to sell me; I am interested in how they encode things in terms
of their agenda. So this might be translated, or might come across, as suspicion. It is
not.
I just think that when artists speak about other mediums – clay, stone – there is a
certain respect given to discussion of these materials, these real materials, and a
willingness to engage in manufacturing with them. You hear people talking about the
glories of working with clay or working with rubbish, whatever the material is, the joys
of grinding metal, but when people talk about using the computer, especially
surprising in this context when the question is ‘to what extent is it a medium?’, (I
might be wrong about this, which is why I am asking for clarification) there is a
stepping back: yes it is useful, but it is not something I am going to engage with at a
very deep level; I want to use it expediently as a way of producing things quickly. I
know Roger talked about engaging with and getting into some code earlier on. This
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seems to me to be something that has not been addressed. It might not be important
to you, like the other tools.
Keith Brown: I can say it is not important to me because I use it as a kind of found
thing. I did think about programming some 10-15 years ago, but that becomes
prescriptive in a sense and I don’t want to prescribe the outcome in that kind of way. I
have no interest therefore in predetermining and writing software to achieve some
pre-conceived end. Hence the excitement and joy and wonder of that kind of
discovery within the cyber environment or the CAD environment or whatever. With
regard to materials, certainly the first piece I ever produced was a selective laser
sinter piece in nylon twirl. I produced it to mega bronze because I thought the nylon
would be distasteful and would have no particular qualities. When I first saw it I was
absolutely amazed at the breathtaking beauty of the object and its surface. I guess
because of the sintering it didn’t have a solid surface, like a piece of snow or a piece
of cloud. It wasn’t like a material I had experienced before. So that was a revelation
to me. On the other hand the small orangey-coloured object of mine that was passed
around earlier disappoints me – I am not very keen on those qualities and I don’t like
that process. But the long piece, the layer-manufactured small wood-like object that
was passed around, I think it is a fascinating material. I showed a long piece and an
ABS plastic piece. There is no way I would send the ABS plastic piece to the long
machine because it wouldn’t fit and wouldn’t function particularly successfully within
that specific medium. I don’t know if that goes some way to answering your question,
but materials are important.
Heidi Reitmaier: I thought there might be some relationship between what you
mentioned, Keith, and Annie’s point about taking this journey into the computer but
not really wanting to go there.
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Annie Cattrell: I am very limited, I have to admit. I have to embrace learning much
more than I know at present. Unlike everyone else who makes work, I haven’t played
on the computer at all, I just use it as a three-dimensional photograph. I have made a
replica of the information and have done that very deliberately, not distorted it or
played with it. We have just taken what I wanted conceptually and recreated it. The
people who sponsored me did various different types of models for me in order to
experiment encapsulating them and see how best they turn out. When I first saw the
one I ended up using, I was amazed. I like to look at things at quite close proximity,
at the proximity of looking at the creases on your finger. I am fascinated with that and
that is the level I am interested in, especially with the head and the brain work. I
loved the conceptual parallel between the scanning of the brain which was in slices
and actually the making of the work. It was made in the same way as the information
was brought out of the head. These are things that are hidden in there. And when I
showed the image of the wax piece, I said I have to return to that armature. I think
the armature that keeps the model up is really interesting in the same way as anyone
who has done bronze casting looks at the sprues and says ‘aren’t they gorgeous’ and
then ends up cutting them off. There are things that, yes I would like to return to; it is
just so expensive, though, and I don’t have the kind of residency in rapid-prototyping
places to go in and play and I don’t have the skills on the computer to do it, so for me
it was a way. I had to take the journey fairly quickly into producing it, but I am really
interested in making something which is sintered with the kind of melted little
granules of plastic which are a bit like flour and lasers go into the bed of the box of
that nylon sintering stuff. Then you pull the object out, which is just like magic, or the
resin or the wax. That is at the back of my mind, but it is not something I have access
to. This is why I am so low-level from the experimentation point of view.
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Christiane Paul: In the end it all boils down to the question of tool versus medium,
using technologies more as a tool, more in the process as opposed to all of the
capabilities of the medium and again I think both ways are fine and legitimate.
Heidi Reitmaier: When we began the symposium, we opened with techniques about
new forms of making. We had an engineer’s perspective and demonstrations of how
many of these processes progress to innovative forms which are unique and very
distinct from the commercial world. We distinguished early on in Christiane’s talk
about the difference between tool and media, looked at some fantastic practices and
touched on issues around production. What I am going to take away from this
symposium is an interest not just in new technologies but also in the agency of the
artist and what it means in terms of practitioners. Maybe it offers more conceptual
freedom or a different kind of conceptual freedom, but certainly I think it might
question one’s notion of artistic beliefs and ways of working. We looked at the link
between the physical process and the virtual world. What I didn’t foresee was so
much scepticism about new technology and new processes. But different
perspectives and different perceptions are interesting. At some point Keith exclaimed
we shouldn’t look back, which is a useful point; but, thinking about the idea of
historical language and the continuum of thoughts, there is definitely this notion of the
act of translation which was key in creating something unexpected. I am interested in
the visual translation from data information, making data information real, and
certainly this came up. And ultimately we return to the point with which we started –
the idea of what is left out, and where artistic choices and the liberty to make
metaphor or create slippages of meaning happens. We spoke about collaboration
and collaborative practices, how both take place in universities today; we discussed
who teaches, how art teaches, how we can make things different and new and
ensure chance is actually written into the collaborative processes, what emerges
from it, and the collaboration of spectators. The idea of relational and social
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sculptures was brought up; how we create new forms of communities. But ultimately
we seem to end with this idea of the object and the new forms, and we spoke of the
new order of forms with some scepticism, in part because it was questioned about
investing in this idea of ‘new’ and also the idea of whether or not this ‘new’ order of
forms matters conceptually, and whether technology makes that much difference in
terms of how we perceive and think about objects.
Inevitably we have ended up with the possibility of making objects that were
previously unimaginable, ways in which we have new objects filled with oddities and
ambiguities, whether a hare or a tree; it is about the ways in which they become
something that they weren’t before. And the problems of cost, technical complexities,
and the appropriateness of materials – all of which we discussed – these affect the
object and where we end up. All in all, I think we are perhaps at a point where
intuition and expression and how the order struggles or grabbles with the articulation
of ideas ultimately leaves us able to create something unique.
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