{"id":4622,"date":"2011-09-27T00:31:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T22:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/?p=4622"},"modified":"2011-09-27T12:18:34","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T10:18:34","slug":"turku-the-art-bit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/turku-the-art-bit\/","title":{"rendered":"Turku: The art bit"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past three weeks I\u2019ve been in Turku, in the studio of Gallery Titanik<\/a>, whacking away at the RepRap Mendel Prusa<\/a> 3D printer. I\u2019ve been kept so busy toiling with this that I\u2019ve lost sight of the grander scheme of things, like why I\u2019ve been building the printer in the first place. I\u2019ve been putting off communicating what I\u2019m doing not because I don\u2019t think it\u2019s worthwhile, but rather because the more immediate problems of finding screws or getting the electronics to work seemed so much more pressing; and besides, it ought to be obvious what I\u2019m doing, no?<\/p>\n

Then again, every once in a while it’s good to remind oneself that one of the few telling differences between an artist and a crazy person is that an artist at least nominally does her stuff for an audience, while the crazy keeps to herself or only occasionally performs for medical personnel.<\/p>\n

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If the Work of art in the age of reproduction<\/a> spoke about the disappearance of aura, of authenticity and a direct interaction between any one artist and her audience, the means of reproduction through RepRaps and similar DIY machines reintroduce at least the authenticity of the machine \u2014\u00a0or its configuration, parts and calibration \u2014\u00a0into the object.<\/p>\n

There are things about fabbing which sets it apart from traditional reproduction, as for example there is no original on which any copy is modeled but only a digital model created to exist in a different medium from that of any physical copy. Any artworks which are printed from a CAD file are originally only ever mathematical descriptions in a 3D-file format on computer storage. So although the printed object isn\u2019t unrelated to the artwork, it certainly has a random element to it, a stutter in its materiality.<\/p>\n

Historically art was about creating objects which based on esthetics and social function were considered \u201cartistic,\u201d then around the time of Fountain it became explicitly about an artistic aura, and then fluxus<\/em> removed even the “work\u201d part of \u201cart work\u201d which after post-modernism left us with the free-for-all shit buffet we\u2019re at today. Perhaps fabbing could at least offer a lifesaver? <\/p>\n

With fabbing, we have the possibility of having art which is highly conceptual, but which manifests itself physically not by the mediation of the initial artist, but rather through printers \u2014 machines and their operators \u2014 which exist in a DIY sphere and so are all different, temperamental, uneven;\u00a0In another word, they are unique. But just as we don\u2019t give artistic merit to the assembly-line worker who manufactures the printer with which we print our photographs, we are unlikely to attribute artistic merit to whomever assembled the printer which prints our CAD-models.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rather, an actualized 3D-print might be the artwork of an artist, but it\u2019ll have the aura of the machine, or rather the aura of the DIY home fabrication process of building and tuning the machines; If movements can impart aura, it\u2019s an aura of industry dependent on craft, an inversion of industrialization, transforming engineers into cottage industry artisans churning out other peoples art objects.<\/p>\n

nathan7: and I want a good print
\nnathan7: a really good print
\nnathan7: without overhangs ruining things
\nnathan7: it’s about the end result here<\/em><\/p>\n

From a discussion on IRC #RepRap\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea of personal fabrication is positioned to affect the manifestation and appreciation of art as soon as some critical mass and manufacturing capacity is reached: The result will be analogue objects bearing the likeness of art; not simulacrum or simulation, but a second order relation to the artwork, twinned with the aura of machine. Perhaps fabbing can be a disruptive enough technology to change the artists role into something new, something interesting, something other than making artworks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the past three weeks I\u2019ve been in Turku, in the studio of Gallery Titanik, whacking away at the RepRap Mendel Prusa 3D printer. I\u2019ve been kept so busy toiling with this that I\u2019ve lost sight of the grander scheme of things, like why I\u2019ve been building the printer in the first place. I\u2019ve been … Continue reading Turku: The art bit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[279,546],"tags":[829,1888,854,1393,1119,1501,365,1497],"class_list":["post-4622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-projects","tag-3d-printing","tag-art","tag-fabbing","tag-reprap","tag-residency","tag-sumu","tag-theory","tag-turku"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4622"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4647,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4622\/revisions\/4647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monocultured.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}