Arts, Artists, and Creativity

For the purpose of understanding how 3D technology influences artistic concepts and the production of sculpture projects, literature associated with several contemporary sculptors’ works was explored. In the work entitled Snow Sculpture for Chicago, artist Tony Tasset used 3D scanning and computer numerical control technology to digitize and reproduce a life-sized pile of snow. Digital technology brings a hyper-realistic quality to the work. His work expresses a confrontation between natural elements and human behaviour in an urban environment. As described by the Museum Without Walls, the work is now a permanent sculpture installation defined through a permanent public art proposition:

Chicago artist Tony Tasset created this conceptual sculpture, a pile of snow, as a site-specific installation for the west window of the Goldblatt’s building facade. This window is the only remaining display window of the former department store. To create a hyper-realistic replica of a typical Chicago snow pile, Tasset included pieces of handcrafted debris such as coffee cups and matchbooks. In his assessment “these piles of snow are sublime; both ugly and beautiful, like life.” (CultureNOW, 2004)

From a different perspective, artist Brian Tolle’s work is in relation with the natural environment but also explores technological approaches to sculpture practice. In the work titled Eureka, Tolle used a 3D environment scanner to digitize a building façade and CNC milled it in Styrofoam. The project, presented in Ghent, Belgium, was a collaborative work and, as Tolle explained, the concept was a technological challenge:

The idea was to try to do something that hadn’t been done before. So there I am, in Belgium—I had been speaking with people about various software packages . . . I was interested in software that simulates real wave algorithms to test the hulls of ships. So I found a building, a 17th-century canal house, and we digitally mapped its façade. Then we created a virtual water plane and tour boats modeled after those that cruise the canal . . . We then reflected the building’s data onto this modeled surface. The computer model was then output in full-scale 3D using a CNC milling machine—that model was sculpted using Styrofoam, coated with urethane and painted by hand. The result is a collision between water and architecture, creating something between the two. The ripples that disturb the façade in Eureka are actual waves cutting through the building. I wanted to express something that technology enabled me to bring into real time, real space and integrate it into a landscape rather than onto a picture plane. (Museum Without Walls, 2014)

Tolle’s artwork reflects how 3D digital technology influences the artist’s creative process from concept to production. Combining simulated water wave images with 3D data, the Eureka project was enlarged and CNC milled. It is interesting to see how the artist combines software technology, to simulate the movement of water, with 3D scanning processes, to digitize a life-sized building façade. The artist appropriates the building form data to further merge both data sets and create a 3D sculptural project. Hence, as experienced by Tolle, digital technology exposes artists to a spatial-temporal dimension that affects the mode of the artwork production and influences the artwork aesthetics. Technology also lends itself to collaborative works.

From a different perspective, artist Paula Hayes proposed works such as sustainable cities, a bio art concept that combines nature, living plants, and a technological mode of production. The work entitled Nocturne of the Limax maximus

(MOMA, 2010), for example, offers a combined hands-on traditional approach through glass blown vessels and a technological mode of production as the work’s realization was done at the Digital Atelier. Hayes’s concept addresses questions of sustainability and conservation through living sculpture representations:

Since the 1990s, New York–based artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes (b. 1958) has produced botanical sculptures—organically shaped vessels made from blown glass, silicone, or acrylic and filled with a rich variety of plant life—that expand upon the classic terrarium, both through their imaginative containers and the microcosmic universes within. Hayes has conceived an installation for the Museum lobby that includes a fifteen-foot- long, wall-mounted horizontal sculpture for the west wall, and a free-standing, egg-shaped, floor-to-ceiling structure nearby. Organic in form and containing a variety of living plants. . . . (MOMA, 2010)

Canadian artist David Rokeby’s (2012) work titled Plot Against Time #4 (Atlantic Baroque) proposes a study of movement through the filming of seabirds diving for small fish on the coast of Newfoundland. As the work explores patterns of movement over time, the subject used in the study proposes a view of the living addressing the concept of duration linked to present, past, and future perception:

Plot Against Time is a series of works that explore patterns of movement over time. They are attempts to visualize the extended present which French philosopher Henri Bergson called “duration”. . . the present pregnant with the past (and future). The works effectively stretch the viewer’s eye across time to offer a perceptual experience of duration. (Rokeby, 2012)

While Rokeby’s work does not include objectification of the subject studied, American artist Geoffrey Mann (2005-2010) uses rapid prototyping combined with

cinematic technology to express through sculptural form how he is “fascinated with transposing the ephemeral nature of time and motion.” Mann explores nature, time, and movement and transposes it through technology to create a palpable object in space. In his work titled Attracted to Light, Mann studies the flight of moths as they interact with light and, using selective laser sintering (SLS) (an additive 3D printing process), he materializes time and motion:

Attracted to Light narrates the erratic behavior of a moth upon the stimulus of light. The trajectory is captured through cinematic technology and the echo of the path, materialized through rapid prototyping . . . The Long Exposure series materialising the ephemerality of time and motion. . . . deciphering the trace of the unseen form. The extruded apparitions within the Long Exposure series narrate the rationale of the movement. (Mann, 2005-2010)

For more than a decade, Mann’s creative exploration has led to a 3D digital technology mode of production. In his work, a deep understanding of the ways in which digital technology opens new ways of perceiving, interacting, and conceptualizing through different spatial-temporal sensory experiences. In Mann’s works, the concept of materiality has expanded to the point of capturing and materializing the distance between objects, freezing their movement in space. Therefore the travel of forms or the trace of a frozen moment in space is objectified. Using digital photographic processes to capture movement and 3D modelling software to manipulate data, forms can now behold an action and the digitally formatted object is 3D printed with RP technology. An immaterial concept, such as the distance travelled by a given subject, can now become a sculptural object. In this way, creative approaches to 3D digital technology influence artists’ spatial- temporal interaction and their artwork aesthetics.