by Sophie Kahn
“Derived from petrochemicals boiled into being from the black oil of a
trillion ancient bacterioles, the plastic used in 3D Additive
manufacturing is a metaphor before it has even been layered into shape.”
-
The Additivist Manifesto, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel
Rourke
In certain spheres of the art world, a suspicion hovers around 3D
printed sculpture, not unlike the one that dogged photography fifty
years ago, or cast sculpture before that: the artist’s contribution was
only to push the button; the machine did all the work. This mistrust
bleeds over to the art market too: institutions and museums have been
slow to acquire 3D printed work, citing archival concerns around
materials
1 (though plastic will linger in landfill for
millennia) or worries about originality with an object that could be
mechanically reproduced (though the art market has shown itself to be
capable of commodifying far more ephemeral artworks). 3D printed pieces
are exhibited with designed objects more often than with contemporary
sculpture in other media.
Digital fabrication is widely used by blue-chip sculptors, as an
improvement on the pointing machine, which allowed artists to scale
sculptures up or down. Artists like Jeff Koons and Charles Ray rely on
high-end 3D scanning and CNC milling, although all traces of the digital
are literally erased from their works: the milling lines left by the
robotically controlled drill are polished away (although a cool eeriness
remains). More recently, though, a new generation of contemporary
artists have turned a more critical eye on 3D scanning and printing. In
various ways, these artists are challenging the assumptions behind these
technologies, and coming to grips with the philosophical question of
what it means capture and then fabricate a digital model. What follows
is not a comprehensive survey, but a few examples of artists whose work
interrogates the technologies employed in its making, and which
addresses certain qualities of the digital: namely, the fact that a file
can be duplicated, altered and distributed via a network before being
materialized as an art object in a gallery.
Morehshin Allahyari, #dog #dildo
#satellite-dish from the series "Dark Matter." 3D printed ABS
plastic, 2014
Morehshin Allahyari’s Dark Matter series is a bizarre, humorous mashup
of 3D printed items that would be banned in the artist’s native Iran. A
dog sprouts a dildo that morphs into a satellite dish; a pig is melded
into a machine gun. Allahyari’s series reads as the imagined plastic
detritus of a future black market, the first step towards a world in
which which objects can be pirated and circulated as readily as .mp3
files; yet the works also seem to express an understanding that a small,
plastic 3D print is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Rokudenashiko, various images from the
creation and performance of Man Boat, 2014
A number of other artists have also addressed the distribution of taboo
data via 3D printing, among them Rokudenashiko (née Japanese artist
Megumi Irashi, whose pseudonym loosely translates as
“good-for-nothing-girl”) whose creation of a kayak from a 3D scan of her
vagina led to an arrest under obscenity charges. Irashi was cleared of
obscenity, but fined for distributing ‘pornography’, i.e. the 3D scan
file itself.
Addie Wagenknecht, Untitled (Vases
1-3), 3D printed nylon, 2016, photograph courtesy of bitforms
gallery
Close inspection of Addie Wageknecht’s untitled vases reveals that the
elegant, skeletal white vases are made up of parametrically arranged, 3D
printed guns. Wageknecht created these from files released by Defense
Distributed, who published their 3D printable gun files for public
download in in 2013. Wageknecht’s subversion cuts both ways: the
21st-century sword is wrought into a ploughshare, made inert and
decorative; but the designed object, in the traditionally feminized
realm of decor, now reads as sinister and filled with the potential for
violence.
Josh Kline, Productivity Gains,
installation photograph by Joerg Lohse for the New York Times
Photographers have long explored the eeriness of duplication, especially
when it comes to the human body. The still image has variously been
compared to a doppelgänger, a corpse,
2 or a mummy. The theory
of the uncanny valley posits that the closer to verisimilitude a
simulated human becomes, the more disturbing it will be.
3
Many contemporary artists working with 3D have mined the strangeness of
digital simulation, from Jonathan Monaghan, whose work imagines ruptures
of varying kinds in glossy rendered corporate utopias, to Josh Kline,
whose 3D printed and plastic-bagged human figures were described in a
Times review as ‘mortuary’.
4
Oliver Laric, Kopienkritik,
2011, installation view at Skulpturhalle Basel; photo by Gunnar Meier
Artists like Oliver Laric or Tom Burtonwood, who have both conducted
extensive 3D scanning projects within a museum context, situate the
digital copy/paste/remix aesthetic within an older tradition of casting
and copying sculpture, for educational ends (or perhaps for the purposes
of forgery).
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Portraits and
samples from East Hampton: Sample 1, from Stranger Visions,
color 3D print, 2013
Others replicate the human face and body to more pointed ends, as in the
case of Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions which critiqued the
disturbing development of genetic surveillance by creating a series of
speculative 3D printed identikit portraits created from found DNA.
McArthur Freeman, Balloon Bump,
resin cast from 3D print, 5.3” x 13” x 5.5”, 2014
McArthur Freeman’s sculptures walk the fine line between elegant and
grotesque. The bulbous, intricate forms imply the body without depicting
it; they contain a myriad of references, from the bodily excesses of the
Baroque era, to early twentieth-century Disney cartoons, and to
contemporary depictions of hybridity and racial identity. The artist
writes “The work is about... exploring, confronting , and creating
distorted images of self in the form of myths, stereotypes, and
fantasies, particularly around ideas about blackness and race."
5
The artist’s sculptural practice, too, is a hybrid one, bridging
traditional clay and bronze casting with ZBrush ‘virtual clay’ sculpting
and high-resolution, highly finished 3D printing processes.
Geoffrey Mann, Shine, cast
bronze with silver plate, 2010
Some of the most visually striking artworks use technology against the
grain, pushing it to the point of failure and examining the artifacts
that result. Geoffrey Mann’s Shine was created from a ‘poor’ scan of a
Victorian candelabra, one which captured spikes of reflected light as
well as the form of the candelabra itself. Instead of correcting these,
Mann had the original glitchy scan 3D printed and then cast in bronze
and plated in silver. The resulting object retains the traces of all the
digital and material operations it has gone through. Taken to its
extreme, there is a kind of existential terror in the notion of a chain
of diverging, failed digital copies. Geoff Manaugh, writing on the 3D
reconstruction of King Tut’s tomb, says: “we could perhaps expect to see
a series of these “exact” copies gradually diverge more and more—a
detail here, a detail there—from the original reference space, a chain
of inexact repetitions and flawed surrogates that eventually come to
define their own architecture, with, we can imagine, no recognizable
original in sight.
Sophie Kahn, Triple Portrait of E,
3D printed nylon, life size, 2014
I write this essay not as a critic but as an artist myself, working with
the same tools used by the artists discussed above. In my own work, I
misuse 3D laser scanners, and create sculpture from the damaged data and
conflicting spatial coordinates that result from attempting, and
failing, to capture the moving body. I aim for a subtle and poetic
subversion in my work; a teasing-out of the unintended emotional
resonances of new imaging technologies that claim, and fail, to freeze
time and record every detail of our lives. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is more
direct in her challenge to artists. On genetic surveillance (although
the same could be extended to many other technologies), she writes: “it
is the complexities, limits, biases, and weaknesses of these new
technologies we need to excavate... The media will talk about how it all
works, but to fully understand, to appropriately educate others… and to
form strategies of resistance, we need to know how it breaks.”
6
1 Little information is available on the archival properties
of 3D printed materials. Carolien Coon, a UK-based researcher, is one of
the few conducting research into this field:
https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/heritage/attachments/benvghr3-coon
2 The Ontology of the Photographic Image, André Bazin and
Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1960), pp. 4-9
3
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/the-uncanny-valley
4
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/t-magazine/art/josh-kline-unemployment-art.html?_r=0
5 As quoted in Michael Harris, Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art, Number 21, Fall 2007, pp. 110-114
6
http://thenewinquiry.com/sci-fi-crime-drama-with-a-strong-black-lead/