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

41

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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