Sarah Redden

Blue Rabbit Iteration III

11.18.2014

 

I am working with mis-printed objects and pieces, made by the hand of a 3D print head.

I have asked, if in a time where we are increasingly gaining the ability for anyone to make anything, is it important to question our ability to make no-thing?

If no-thing doesn’t or can’t exist, can it be made  to exist?
what would that look like?
In this context I have chosen primarily not to engage with the printers directly, but instead to work with their (our) mistakes, the pieces crafted in error, lacking intentionality and therefore lacking use value,  perceived as “use-less”. The objects created out of error are organic and chaotic, half resembling “something” and mostly resembling a lack of “anything”.
To accompany the following images I would like to share some of the more recent points of inquiry I have been wading around.
Can we un-do what we’ve done by continuing to do?
Could no-thing be found in objects that are not what they are supposed to have been?
Could these unintentional objects be quite an appropriate medium to represent no-thing?
What is the relationship between nothingness and vastness?
This is where I would like to start off.

 

 

A found image by Ed

“A nightly print gone wrong” by Ed

 

 

 

 

 

Image by: Creative Tools/Flickr (Motherboard)

The two images above yield from a search of the World Wide Web.

The image directly above is the only image that appears more than once in the search results.

Most of the images I have seen of mis-printed objects are captured while the piece is still on the printer, hot off the press, hot off the mess.

It is curious to think of what they might have looked like in the soft virtuality of the software they were conceived in.

The following image is my concept in virtuality.

“screen shot”

 

I have learned, as I’m sure many of you have too, that there are types of objects that just cannot be printed on the 3D printers in the CAL.

Certain things cannot be printed either because of design dynamics and dimension, or because the CAL lab aids are not keen on severely disrupting the mechanisms of the printers

while many other people also intend to print,

because printing takes time, and is therefore, a part of the priority of this creation process.

Lately I have been thinking about the glitch pieces  I’ve been gathering as sort of embodiments of wasted of time, manifestations of error being let be too long.

In the next six photographs I have attempted to illuminate these objects as anything but wasted time.

“5″

 

 

“half”

The filament lines shown in the images above remind me of the traced scan-line, the shadow of the dance that occurs when a person is 3D scanned.

Although the lines are different for these objects,

as the (re)productive motion and exchange between things is conveyed in a sort of plastic electrocardiogram showing the death of intention.

 These glitch pieces posses shadow like qualities in more ways that one, in that the objects re-present more than just what appears physically.

 

"halfless"

“2″

 

 

“matching”

 

 

“opening”

 

In the shadows of these objects it becomes clear not only how they look, but how they can be seen.

 I have come to know these glitch objects as anything other than filled with lost potentiality.

I have been exploring them for weeks, feeling out how they break, how they bend, how they carry the weight of themselves and how they do not.

Through this process I have learned that there is much to be seen in what did, but more importantly, what did not occur on the print bed.

The glitch objects shown above are filled with space where there was once intentionality.

These unintentional objects convey what the printers create when confronted with the unknown, what the machine does when it does not know what to do.

 

IMG_5176

“an ‘analogue’ composite piece”

 

In the image above is of a few mis-print objects placed on a physical print of a digital computer software glitch.

The piece is a screen shot taken in 2003, called Electronic Card (detail), by Curt Cloninger (Morandi et al. 104).

As I am working with physical glitches, it seemed fitting to use a physical print of a computer glitch to create a composite image,

bringing two types of glitch together in the physical world.

Iman Moradi has defined glitch as

” an artifact resulting from an error.

It is neither the cause, nor the error itself, it is simply

the product of an error and more specifically

its visual manifestation.

It is a significant slip that marks departure from our expected results”

(Moradi 8)

The print and the objects have similar characteristics, exist in different dimensions, but were conceived of similar processes.

  Portraying the  3D printed glitch objects within printed representation of digital glitch artwork  feels akin to viewing them in their natural environment.

This is another presentation of a way in which I feel these unfamiliar objects of uselessness can be seen as appearing very natural.

The image below is an exploration of the same ecology, yet it has been edited in Photoshop on the computer, the “natural habitat” of the piece rather than that of the object.

3D printed glitch objects have been introduced into the white space of a video still called January 11th Saturday, by Cory Arcangel (Morandi et al. 41).

 

“a digital composite piece”

 

Bibliography

Ed. “A Nightly Print Gone Wrong.” blog. 3D printing. N.p., 24 Dec. 2011. Web.

Moradi, Iman et al. Glitch: Designing Imperfection. First. New York, NY: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009. Print.

Turk, Victoria. “Motherboard.” 3D-Printed Mistakes Are Inspiring a New Kind of Glitch Art. N.p., 23 Oct. 2014. Web.