fabbing – Page 2 – Monocultured

Fabbing. Now in real time. Or in China. Or at your place.

A couple of weeks ago The Pirate Factory in Malmö demonstrated their RepRap. There’s Flickr pool of the event up here with a shaky video at the end of it. They’re using a spruced up version from Bits from Bytes which looks slightly less dingy than the RepRap usually does (also, it uses a more powerful microcontroller for driving the printer independently of a computer — apparently an SD card is enough) and judging from the pictures there was a bunch of people present. I wonder which of the pictures are going to be used in Swedish school-books in the future, as illustrations of the fabbing revolution and micro-production…

Speaking of which, Wired has an article up on the current state of how manufacturing companies have become accessible to anyone with a credit card, lowering the cost of admission into mass production to more or less zero. Atoms are the new bits is worth your time if you’re the least interested in these matters, or the future in general. It’s full of interesting links, like the one to alibaba.com, an enormous portal of Chinese manufacturers.

I wonder what the environmental costs will be of bespoke production; To some extent you’ll have less hit-and-miss toys occupying landfills, but this gain might well be offset by increased packaging and shipping, or some other corollary. Also, I wonder if these long-tail manufacturing plants will go global or if China and such countries will retain their head start; We in the west will only ever manufacture wars.

If intellectual properties will become impossible to enforce — something which isn’t certain, given the oppressive laws which are passed to counter transparency and openness — this would indeed shift not only the knowledge of how to do something but also the rational for the existence of a specific company. If you can download the plans for a SAAB, you just need someone to manufacture it. In the end, just as globalization has killed the connection between brand and production — after all, the cheap manufacturing plants exist exactly because of the Export Processing Zones in Vietnam and China — it might well kill the last remnant of Company with a capital “c,” the brand with an address.

These realizations are not lost on industry folk, but no-one wants to admit their own obsolescence, thus there’s no hurry to come up with new business models. The exceptions are Threadless of the world, but those start from the bottom up and don’t have to reinvent themselves; Let’s see how well Apple handles the transition — if at all.

Joren De Wachter has written a summation of the coming upheavals — The Return of the Public Domain — and it’s a text targeting those in the manufacturing & design industry. Even though he’s hopeful, or rather, not fearful, of the technological changes which will change intellectual property as we understand it, his text is very thin on the details of how companies will cope, and focus rather on the knowledge workers themselves. (Proffesional Idea Generators, he calls us, which might actually go as an acronym on my next business card)

However, there is also a very clear positive side to the new developments described above for Professional Idea Generators. The new business models that become necessary will clearly provide them with significant competitive advantages for doing business in an environment where the Public Domain is important. Knowledge and expertise, cost effectiveness, continued innovation and networking are key competences of Professional Idea Generators. This puts them in a very strong position in respect of the new developments.

The sentiment seems to be that “someone will still make money, if they just figure out how to add their own knowledge as a value which can be commodified.” As things stand, only those who make stuff will be needed, those who actually have the tools and raw material to manufacture something. Everyone else is part of the Public Domain. And not only figuratively as someone who designs webpages or new pens, but they themselves become part of the commons, and last time I checked there was a tragedy involved in the commons under any scarcity-driven economic model.

You’re going to need a special secret sauce, armed guards keeping it safe for long enough to sell it. And even then you’re either competing for a nieche audience which wants the exclusive, or your elbowing for space with other companies, competing on price.

And here’s a narrative which might seem familiar: Over at The Millions, there’s an interview with a guy who pirates books, and in the comments section some people are upset over a lack of morals. In ten years time, when your kids are printing modified pirated Nikes, maybe the kneejerk debate will be different, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Home fabbing is killing Nike!

Fabbing: Been there, done that, made a copy of the copy.

I’m putting together a project description of a workshop I’d like to run. The people I’ve pitched to are enthusiastic, but putting the course into academic-speak is difficult. It’s about 3D printing and other rapid manufacturing technologies, so I’m trying to get my bearings on the state of the art.

I don’t know how I missed the Rhizome article on the subject, Means of Production: Fabbing and Digital Art, as it’s a good primer on how radpid manufacturing is used in modern art. To sum it up: There isn’t much happening and what is happening is mostly concerned with sculptural works.

(Then again, there are trials with printing living cells, so your kids might soon be able to not only pull the legs off spiders, but design and manufacture better legs as replacement…)

Fabbaloo links to a 2001 presentation by Marshall Burns and James Howison which pretty well sums up what I tried to express in the pirate ebay post, when it comes to how our relationship to the object might change:

As in other cases where revenues are in doubt, designers and manufacturers will have to ask themselves what business they are in. In other words, what is it that people will pay them for, what will be their value proposition? Clearly, it will become harder to get paid for the physical arrangement of atoms in a product because that will be too easy for fabbers to make. Even the creative content (“intellectual property”) of a design fades in monetary value because it is too easily duplicated. Link

But now I do have to stop. I simply must. I must put away the Red Bull cans, and stop clicking and typing. I have to stop, so I can print my bed. I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it.

→ IconEye, Bruce Sterling: The hypersurface of this decade (Via Fabbaloo)

Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.

→ MIT, Fluid Interfaces Group: Cornucopia, Digital gastronomy (Via Shapeways)

On the moon, a research station is being constructed by robots.On top of a gantry, in place of the usual lifting hoist, an automatic arm extends downwards over the station. At the end of this arm, a nozzle squirts a concrete-like material onto the half-built walls like a mechanical hand icing an implausibly large cake. At the same time, computer-controlled trowels shape and smooth the concrete so that it’s flush with the wall below. The whole assembly moves back and forth to build up internal and external walls in layers. Further robotic arms are positioning services inside the building and lifting lintels onto the walls in order to make the roof. In just 24 hours, the house will be complete.

→ Craft, Lee Hasler: A giant leap for a brickie (pdf)

For some reason I start thinking about the space gel ant colony, where the hapless ants are allowed to burrow in 3D space, and out of a solid material create space. When diving last summer the thought struck me that we lack a model of envisioning architecture as a three dimensional space — not strange since we can’t fly, nor swim through the air — except maybe for the astronauts in space, for whom “up” is an arbitrary concept. (Or the IDF soldiers in Gaza, as BLDGBLOG pointed out recently)

Lets assume that 1) we’re extracting space out of matter, not building spaces, but extruding them out of something; destroying material. 2) And into this shapely void which we have made, we introduce objects that we desire – and we don’t build them, or assemble them, but rather extrude them. Need a table? Extrude it. Need somewhere to place the table? Extrude it.

Human will as a metaphor of a factory; Of a digging, burrowing animal, constantly crawling through strata, leaving tunnels behind, filled with the debris of time, want and need, manifested in ABS plastic.

Fabbing, contd.

Desktop Factory might be the LaserWriter of additive manufacturing. Priced at under $5000 it’s cheaper than the LaserWriter was, and would allow individuals to buy it for themselves or collectives to scrounge funds together. I would love to play around with it; Barring too high running costs (think of the ink in printers) you could do limited edition runs of stuff.

Maybe the RapMan would be good starting kit for a workshop on building and using 3D printers? I’m actually more interested in building the kits than I am using them, but I guess that the practical applications will reveal themselves once I know what can be done. Or whenever I need a new filterholder for a on-camera-flash or something such.

In the end, I’d probably do what everyone does when confronted with a creative outlet with endless possibilities and print genitalia. But it would be a rapidly prototyped genitalia how cool wouldn’t that be!

The link to Desktop Factory came via Fabbaloo, an excellent fabbing blog with a silly name. Then again, once the 3D printing revolution happens and your ten year old kids will print the latest manga characters, they might very well shout “Faa-baa-loooo!” so perhaps it’s just good brand positioning on their part.

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Over at blog.ponoko.com there’s a debate in the comments section about how object models will be pirated, and what effects this will have on the designers and manufacturers of stuff. It’s odd how similar the discussion is to the one about music and movie piracy.

Morals don’t always dictate if we pirate or don’t, but rather convenience. What is considered ethical will be adjusted to the technological lowest common denominator, just as will the job market. It’s not a fair way of going about it, but I don’t know how designers of stuff will make a living in a post-fab world, nor how they can hope to stem the tide of obsolescence. Sitting back with some popcorn and watch the slowly dawning realisation on the faces of panicked designers might become the new spectator sport.

Fabb it all and let the added value sort the back end, maybe? This approach hasn’t prevailed among the more litigious media companies, nor curbed their enthusiasm of that business model. I don’t see the future of fabbing to be any different.

In Neal Stephensons book The Diamond Age nano-manufacturing is a reality. People use matter compilers (MC) to make food or clothes or anything else that they might need or want. (Similar to the cornucopia machines of Charles Stross Singularity Sky, the acronym of which is CM, curiously enough) As long as they have the blueprints for something, they can build it. As long as you have access to a feed line you can use it to make stuff. (This is part of what fabbing might offer, even though we’re far off from nano-assembly)

In the book there’s talk of the seed, a concept where you’ll have self-contained seeds that can grow into whatever you’d like. The difference being that their energy stores are self-contained and wouldn’t have to rely on a centrally controlled feed, much like a seed draws upon the earth and surrounding nutrients when growing. One variation on this theme is presented on by Sascha Pohflepp in the work Growth Assembly, a series of drawings reminiscent of the Codex Seraphinianus but with real-world application instead of high fantasy.

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As for fabbing in art, I still haven’t found much worth mentioning. I might be looking in all the wrong places though.

Peter Jansen did a sculpture series, Strange Attractors, using 3D printing to create molds which are then cast in bronze. the shapes themselves are created using the Chaoscope software, which itself is used to generate representations of strange attractors (something I’m wholly unqualified to tell you anything about except that it’s related to chaos theory) examples of which you can see in their gallery. They make for pretty pictures, and to someone who understands the math involved I’m sure there’s an theoretically beautiful part that is unknowable to the rest of us, but it’s just not very interesting. Casting them in bronze doesn’t add much conceptual value to them, neat though it might be.

A better beginning would perhaps be Peters Human Motion series, but I’m not certain if they’re fabbed or traditionally sculpted and cast. As a comment of a technology on its relationship to space and previous art — Nude Descending and Muybridges studies of motion — it might be an interesting statement of intent. But halting there, making the object itself the work of art, would be dull. As it stands I don’t even know if the motion series was fabbed, but one would hope that there will be more to the tech than mere convenience for sculptors. Not that I begrudge them that, mind.

The link to Peter Jansen came via Metafilter: Human Motions

3D printing. Fabbing. Lockpicking.

Jonas has graciously spent time with us in Gothenburg and just got back to Stockholm, the town north of here. I’ve signed up for a few more dives and am looking forward to that. SKUP PALET, the art organisation that a bunch of us have started, is slowly getting its shit together and it looks like we’re going to represent at an art fair in Copenhagen. I visited Arcam today, the Gotheburg company that produces stuff in titanium that I wrote about in the post on rapid prototyping, and had a chat and a tour of their facilities; I got some insight into how specialised their buisiness model is, with only 50 machines worldwide.

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As research before my MFA lockpicking presentation I interviewed Marc Weber Tobias. He had forwarded his Skype account to his cellphone and talked to me as he stopped for gas somewhere in a desert. The world felt just as small and awesome as when I was in high school and interviewed NASA for the radio show we were doing. (The feeling being “I can call anyone and ask anything!”) There’s an article on him and his doings over at Wired, which you might enjoy.

→ Wired, Charles Græber: The ultimate lock picker exposes weak military installations, corporate systems

What comes through in the article – beside his drive and intelligence – is the lack of patience with stupidity and a genuine fascination with stuff. It’s a quality that many nerds and other obsessive people share, and I sympathise with it. It’s this fascination that I was trying to gleam at my meeting with Patrik Ohldin at Arcam.

Of course, coming from a sci-fi reading background and with my head full of ideas on the end of stuff that rapid prototyping is hearalding, I felt much as the city kid staring in awe and disbelief at someone milking a cow. Patrik had a much more buisiness minded approach to the technology; He keeps abreast of what is happening in their sector, but the changing human perception of what originality implies in the face of CAD-to-production just isn’t part of their business. Making spare parts for humans and cars is.

It was nice to see what they were up to, and it’s always exiting to learn first hand about hight tech stuff, but now I feel I’d need to complement this excursion with a visit to the lo-fi end of the spectrum. Are there any home-fabbers in Gothenburg? Point them in my direction.

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The Pirate eBay and other scenarios.

I’ve been trying to get my head around 3D printing. In the futuristic sense of the word it’s the manufacture of a hot dog complete with relish and mustard. It’s such a transformative technology that I’d like to get in on the game somehow, not only read about it. This is an attempt to put stuff onto paper. Pardon the rambling.

Let’s divide the making of things into five mechanical categories, and see if something useful comes of it: Additive, subtractive, shaping, combining. (Molding might be the fifth, or perhaps it’s of the combination order where the object that is being created is the mold, which combined with steel or what–have–you causes the negative object. Ignore for now.)

The combination of things requires things to combine, the shaping of things requires a material that is malleable besides whatever other qualities you need, the subtractive production (milling, cutting, etc.) need a hunk of material that is bigger than your end result. The additive model allows you to work in multiple materials, at once combining things for whatever function you need them to fill. Today this mostly means a working ball bearing or a surgical knee replacement. This is the technical side of things.

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Some are predicting wholesale piracy, and once the technology becomes cheap enough eBay will surely be flooded by original copies just as The Pirate Bay will be flooded by CAD/CNC program instructions. The joke isn’t lost on anyone that the name of The Pirate Bay will rub off on the auction site once everyone with a RepRap or MakerBot gets up to speed with replicating materials. And why not?

If the remix and DIY approach will hold true for personal fabrication (fabbing) then you’ll be forced to shift gears from “is it what it says it is?” when you relate to objects, to “is it what I want?” Trending and social constructions will still exist because we’re social critters, but they will have to take something else into account (another quality or justification, however arbitrary) and branding of objects might become less relevant.

Michelangelo’s David has been 3D scanned by Stanford and they’re limiting access to the the model, but how long before it’ll be pirated? Once you have an accurate replica next to your garden gnome, does the original matter at all? (If being original is the bees knees, why so afraid of copies? If it’s only a matter of making money by selling the reproduction rights, the losing battle that the music, film and game industries has fought the past ten years is on the doorstep of museums and industrial designers.) Home fabbing is killing IKEA!

We’ll manufacture and use stuff as if it was real but with no sense of “real” left. It’s the post-scarcity of technocrats combined with a corruption of the traditional understanding of materials. It’s a change in volume and sheer numbers, if not in the way we approach things. Material nihilism maybe?

[flv:https://www.monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Bruce.flv https://www.monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Bruce.png 640 360]

Above is the latter part of the end keynote that Bruce Sterling gave at the ReBoot conference. [via Warren Ellis] It’s his take on where we’re heading ideologically and how we can find value in life. He does sound like a whiny old fart part of the time, and there’s little love for his audience, but it’s an articulate rant and I’m not one to scoff at someone who thinks about these things for a living.

Sterlings notion that we ought to get a proper bed and a proper chair make sense if what is left of the objects are our use of them and if the value they provide are somehow measurable by us in a non-arbitrary way. (“Being well rested” is a concept we understand. Extend this to more arbitrary objects and you’ll notice that we have few things that actually carry meanining in the sense that an object in and of itself carries meaning.)

Jamais Cascio referenced the speech with specific regard to how Sterlings ideas relate to 3D printing. Cascio draws parallells to what Postscript and LaserWriter did for desktop publishing in the mid 80’s. (Hollow, bold, underline, cursive Chicago, anyone?) The article is The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution and it’s a good overview of the technology and some of it’s implications.

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We should stop saying ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ and start saying, ‘What’s going on?’. It’s a quote attributed to Marshall McLuhan by Liss Jeffrey and it’s a sensible suggestion.

While teaching future architects at Chalmers I was impressed by their approach to materials and created objects. It is as much a part of their problem as it’s a boon, but they all treated their models as incidental to the process of architecture. The objects didn’t hold any value except what they said of the overall project.

This is in line with how rapid prototyping has been used up to now, and also diametrically opposed to how many artists approach objects. Technically speaking, an artist can’t take a shit without creating an objet d’art, so we tend to guard whatever physical objects we produce. (Piece of art and piece of shit is interchangable in some peoples minds, but even for them it’s the piece that is important.)

But where an architect might view the printed 3D object as a stepping stone to a real object, fabbing offers a rejection of specificity of objects all together – i.e. a knife at your throat bears meaning on your life and well being, but it’s not really important what kind of knife it is. In this hyperbolic example you would do well to ask the McLuhan question: Is the thing at my throat sharp enough to harm me?

I’m being silly and perhaps these ideas don’t apply to all situations, so let’s focus on art and 3D printing. First of all, we’ll have the meta art: “Ooh, you’ve carved a small replica in wood of something that you randomly generated in your 3D printer to make a point about originality. Good for you!” It’s unavoidable and to a certain degree interesting for the debate and theory (I made my Virtual Photography series because I wanted to make a point about virtual worlds and photography) but it’s the next step that will be interesting: The abandon of material sacrament.

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Artist scientists, spefically mathematicians, have experimented with rapid prototyping and sculpture. They are in the odd position of celebrating the pure æsthetics of mathematical shapes and concepts. Carlo H. Séquin is a physicist who has collaborated with artists and sculptors who work with pure form. His article – Rapid prototyping: a 3d visualization tool takes on sculpture and mathematical forms – is the only artistic reference Wikipedia has on 3D printers, and it has very little to do with modern art. The area seems ripe for experimentation.

What I recently wrote about ARGs (Alternative Reality Games) seems applicable to 3D printers. You get an excuse and a means to remake the world in your own imagination or buy into someone elses, literally. Interpretation and allegory – traditionally the priviledge of priests and artists – is now a technological issue, not a metaphysical one: If you can print anything that money can buy you might as well print money. Fake money buying fake things in a fake world; Truly a map on a 1:1 scale if there ever was one.

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If it wasn’t for the inertia of societies the end of this process would find us in a copy of Second Life where we’re all pointing at colourful things and going “meh”. As it stands, this process of virtualising maybe isn’t about shifting the way we manufacture and appreciate things, but will help us remove the clutter – take away everything that isn’t interesting and special and super and reveal the social superstructure onto which the objects were fixed; That designer lamp you liked is only a Google Warehouse click away. (Much in line with what Sterling is suggesting, but not because of an appreciation of craftsmanship or purposeful living but because it’s meaningless in a literal sense.)

Besides the artisan or mundane stuff that we for one reason or another love, objects are deconstructed in a way we should recognise, that of Platonic idea and instance. (But here the idea of an idea isn’t a reductionist problem but the foundation for discussion, the new modernity as Nicolas Bourriaud put it in a recent lecture at Valand.) It’s as if the object becomes stretched out in two directions until you have the plastic, wood and metal in one hand, and an idea or social category in the other. Ceci n’est pas une pip and so on.

I might be lacking whatever gene it is that makes some of the bicycle people not as enthusiastic about my boom-bike as I am. I see it as an instance of a bike, an embodiment of features and designs and materials that under other cicumstanced would be a fancy Bianchi. So when I see the titanium rapid prototyping that Arcam offers I imagine that I could recreate my beater as it was built. The object is incidental, what we imbue it with is not.

You could argue that I am a vulgar person with no appreciation for workmanship. And you would be right.