Sarah Redden
Blue Rabbit Iteration I
Week 4
10.21.2014
The work of Shane Hope
What is not worth not making?
My idea is to work primarily with pieces taken out of the 3-D misprint box in an attempt to make some thing that does not necessarily resemble any thing. In this process I want to experiment with printing methods, and manipulation of printed pieces. I am curious about our relationship to beauty, ornament, decoration, perceptions of “trash”, and “uselessness”. What can be made of the objects that come out of the 3D printers that are “ugly” and useless? In order to explore these ideas I would like to approach the Blue Rabbit project through tactile engagement, using my hands to work with a material that isn’t necessarily made for it, a material made for “computer’s hands”.
Most all of us are all are touched one way or another by the hands of computers. Yet, if things shape the mind, what effect is the un-touchable digital world of “things” having on us in the physical world of multi-dimensions? Through technology, theoretically anyone could make almost anything without touching much. It is important to question this rapid production? Is it important, now more than ever, to attempt at making no-thing? If nothing doesn’t or can’t exist, can it be made to exist?
In both art and science there is much to be seen, but there is also a great deal, and sometimes a great deal of meaning, in that which cannot be. This is a principle explored often in Modern and Post-Modernist art, and also by the four individuals I have found whose work relevantly embodies, plays with, and speaks about, material, abstract 3D printing, trash and Post-Internet art. These folks are Shane Hope, Edward May, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.
Edward May has a WordPress site just like all of us, and that is about the only thing I could find out about him. The website is called “Anti-Composition within Objectism and Post-Internet art”. May writes about many different mediums in relation to Post-Internet art, with one of the unifying themes being the exploration and propulsion of anti-composition. Anti-composition is defined by May as occurring “within post-internet art and new media when something that cannot or does not resemble nature is assembled in a way which is meant to look disturbed.. It is an exploration of nature in a way that is not natural and is a reaction to the use of objects within society.” He goes on to add, “[a]nti-compositionist art cannot resemble natural objects or manufactured items but instead explores the things we cannot see.” (May).
Cue Webster and Noble. In 1998, Tim Noble and Sue Webster made a piece called “Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)”. The piece is made up of trash the artists’ collected trash over a period of six months. Photographs of the piece depict illuminated trash that has been arranged in what appears to be a random heap in the corner of a gallery-type space, but created in the shadow of this trash is a perfect outline of two individuals sitting back to back, drinking and smoking. They have taken a waste object(s) that reveals nothing in itself, only in what it “leaves behind”.
With an interest and skepticism in molecular manufacturing, Shane Hope raids a protein bank database looking for organic shapes of interest, and when they aren’t quite what he was looking for he writes Python script to skew them even further. The designs are then 3-D printed and wildly manipulated in the process. All of the shapes are then amassed and assembled together in a beautiful, chaotic mess. Wired magazine calls Hope’s pieces “paintings”, (Flaherty. Wired) which is another interesting relation to the idea of returning to traditional mediums of art in highly unconventional ways, which is one component of Post-Internet art (May).
I feel that the principles of anti-composition with the relationship to technology and objects, the execution of the British duo’s piece, the technique of Shane Hope, and the influences of many more to come will greatly inform and weave almost seamlessly into the context and exploration unraveling before me. In spending a quarter exploring these ideas I hope to gain a better understanding of my relationship to objects, materials and meaning. Hopefully I will gather greater perspective of the unique ways in which objects carry meaning, or more specifically don’t, and how this is decided and understood, consciously or otherwise. I also expect that I will become quite familiar with PLA as a material and medium of creation, while simultaneously becoming familiar with the physical iterations of student work in class through their trails of printed trial and error, and beautiful mistakes.
Bibliography
Flaherty, Joseph. “3-D Printed Paintings Make Jackson Pollock Look Plain | WIRED.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 8 Oct. 13. Web. 20 Oct. 2014. <http://www.wired.com/2013/10/3-d-printed-abstract-expressionism/all/1#slideid-256431>.
May, Edward. “Anti-composition within Objectism and Post-Internet Art.” Edwardmayobjectismanticomposition. 5 May 2014. Web. 20 Oct. 2014. <http://edwardmayobjectismanticomposition.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/anti-composition-within-objectism-and-post-internet-art/>.
Noble, Tim, and Sue Webster. “Tim Noble & Sue Webster.” Tim Noble & Sue Webster. 1 Jan. 2011. Web. 20 Oct. 2014. <http://www.timnobleandsuewebster.com/>.