A Japanese creative agency applies "cutting-edge" technology to chunks of ice to create multidimensional mini sculptures best enjoyed over -- or in -- a cocktail.
Poplar plywood, paint; 46âĂâ140âĂâ120âcm
Indizes is a data sculpture visualizing the stock market indices Sâ&âP 500, Dow Jones Industrial and NASDAQ from January to November 2008. The values are shown on the three peaks of the five rows of polygons. The data source is Google Finance.
NENDO is a design studio founded by architect and designer Oki Sato.
The reason why I chose NENDO is because of MAD Museum's exhibition, Materializing the Postdigital, mentioned from a previous presentation. A NENDO work is showcased there that I initially regarded as just stones, but reading its description it's actually 3D printed paper. In its description, it states the process:
"A small container created using a 3D printer that cuts, stacks and pastes sheets of paper one by one. We finished the surface with lacquer. The lacquer adhered thickly to the edges of the accumulated paper, and pulled at the paperâs surface, resulting in a mysterious texture like wood grain."
Founded in 2002, his design studio has delved into many different art forms, from product design to furniture design to installation work, depending on the wide range of clientele.Â
One of my favorite works from them is the paperbrick. Printed and cut out from paper but with the perspective and texture of wooden blocks. NENDO website notes,
"A set of paper blocks designed for an insert in Japanese lifestyle magazine Pen. Readers can create a pseudo-3D object by stacking tricolor blocks that seem three-dimensional. Thereâs no danger the blocks will collapse, so itâs possible to make âimpossibleâ forms that defy gravity and play with shade and perspective. Paper-brick can also be enjoyed as a puzzle: if put together carefully, the blocks stack into one large cube. 3D-CAD is about creating virtual three -dimensional forms on a two-dimensional screen surface. This toy aims to translate the concept of 3D-CAD into analog form."
Video links:
50projects_25objects http://vimeo.com/33342291
shivering bowls http://vimeo.com/54103095
growing vases http://vimeo.com/30852099
scatter shelf http://vimeo.com/29187725
interview with oki sato http://vimeo.com/29837778
The Gothic is a dramatic style. Its monumental vaults, soaring colonettes, complex tracery, and detailed ornament have made the religious fervor of the Middle Ages palpable even to this day. Though it is unequivocally dated, its essential impulse to shock and mesmerize with wild manipulations of form is not unlike the one motivating many contemporary architects: The contorting facades of today's computer-aided designs exhibit a similar ostentation, though notably detached from spiritual doctrines. Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has seemingly collapsed centuries of history and brought the two architectural styles together with his laser-cut metal sculptures that look like outrageously twisting Gothic structures. "Delvoye's work celebrates par...
Experiment by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo scrapes depth data from Google Street View which is reconstructed as a point cloud visualization - video embedded below:
Scraping Google Street View depth map and reconstructing it with openFrameworks
A collection of beautiful hires snapshots can be found at Patricioâs Flickr account here
Click on the link below to read my full write-up and check out some links:
Barry X Ball was born in 1955 in Pasadena, CA and lives and works in New York.
Barry is participating in Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, a major exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York that will include works by more than 80 artists, architects, and designers. The show will examine creative expression made possible by advanced methods of computer-assisted production known as digital fabrication. I posted about Out of Hand last week. You can look at the work online here
The show has a ton of really cool and very versatile work. Barry will have two sculptures on view, including the first exhibition of his latest work, Perfect Forms.
Barry X Ball works with a team of people specializing in 3D scanning, modeling, and various forms of output often using CNC milled stone and eventually hand-detailing. Lately he has been working with replication, modification, and the âperfectionâ of the human form both through the works of sculpture masters as in his project, Masterpieces, and through the forms of living people in the contemporary art world as in Portrait Sculptures.
Barry X Ball is very vehement in his belief that he is not simply making copies â he strives in his Masterpieces project to recreate the famous works of art as almost undeniably perfect due to his technology skills and extensive grasp of materials and stone â often recreating the same masterpiece is several different materials. Which is one thing that really attracted me to his work.
Masterpieces, 2008-ongoing
View the series here
While working on this project from 2008 till now, many people have been interested in where he thinks his new sculptures stand in relationship to "Appropriation" and what makes his works more than "copies" as he starts his process off by 3D scanning these masterpieces and eventually fabricates them.
To this he says,
âIn general, I have set for myself the difficult task of making new sculptures that are "more perfect" than the "perfect" Corradini, a "Masterpiece" of Baroque sculpture.â
He claims to do this by working on the sculptures totally in the round, giving every inch of it the same level of care and detail. He also employs non-traditional (for sculpture) stones to his my works as he thinks the great masters he is working from used the stone they did only because it was readily available and they were comfortable with it. He seeks to bring something new with different materials such as pink Iranian onyx, and golden honeycomb calcite. He is interested in reflectivity and translucence as adding movement and a dynamic and atmospheric element to the work.
Also, he says âMy sculptures are mirror images of their sources. The mirroring, a feature of many of my portraits, is intentional. It is the view that the subject "sees" in a mirror. This feat is extremely difficult (i.e. near-impossible) to accomplish through traditional means of sculptural reproduction (e.g. "pointing up"). It is possible through my use of advanced technology, and I hope, adds a significant element of strangeness, of unfamiliarity, of newness to my sculpturesâ
He also seeks to completely perfect the work and says of his work Purity (based off Antonio Corradiniâs La PuritĂ ,1720 â 1725) âI have corrected several of Corradini's sculptural errors. Corradini not only didn't finish the bottom, sides, and back of his sculpture, certain passages of his work are confused. In particular, the layers of his drapery sometimes don't make sense or were not completely resolved. I fixed those problems in my works.â This sounds bit cocky to me (as I also pick up on in a few of his writings and interviews), but he also is in a way restoring these works of art as he accommodates and fixes chips and breaks in the originals.
Whatâs really interesting is the process of creating these works. Check it out here.
Here is a short video of Barry talking about this project as well as his newest piece in the series, Perfect Forms.
This video also gives a close-up view of the works so you can really get a feel for their texture and material qualities.
Portrait Sculptures, 2000-2011
View the series here
This project began as a spiritual renewal for himself. Barry says, âthe extreme labor requirements of producing my work (meaning his previous more minimal and conceptual and abstract works), towards an end that held little of the revelatory unknown, had begun to weigh on me.â He usually has little interaction with his sitters during the whole process which is funny because has said that he chose to do this project to help force him to interact with fellow humans.
His subjects in this series are primarily drawn from the art world â curators, sculptors, collectors, critics. Initially, reference photos and a plaster mold is taken and then a very rough positive sculpture is created from that mold.
To transform my completed models into stone, they are first digitized via cylindrical 3-dimensional laser scanning. The resultant "virtual" models may be digitally manipulated or left as-is. I really like the ones that are skewed and stretched and sometimes morphed with other objects such as this sculpture of Matthew McCaslin with the arms and hands of the artistâs daughter, Soleil X Ball Van Zee as well as the works with the dual-faces and expressions:
The initial stone shaping is accomplished on CNC milling machines. After diamond wire-saw and bridge-saw sizing, the trimmed block was diamond core-drilled to again establish the axis (corresponding to that of the model) that would eventually become the sculpture's impalement wound (meaning how it sits on the stick its installed on). Next followed many days of glacially-slow computer-controlled carving, with multiple passes by progressively finer tooling, on a 3-axis CNC lathe. Hand carving follows and then the piece is complete.Â
As a whole, what I dig most about Barry X Ball's work is his joining of traditional art works and mediums with the new media of digital fabrication. I also appreciate his meticulous attention to detail and material and I think the whole process of these two projects is super interesting because of the large team of people he often employs. It makes me think about how masterwork sculptures were usually completed by one person and in this modern example, they are being made to be more "perfect" but at the "cost"(?) of having/requiring a large team/machinery to do it. As far as the content goes, I am really more drawn to the portrait sculptures in the way they are manipulates and skewed in a way that really references modern technology. I think that, paired with the material, is interesting.Â
With a few modifications made to their egg decorating machine--including the addition of a compact oxy-fuel torch--the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories were able to create what could possibly be the world's first automatic marshmallow toaster.
Marshmallow toasting CNC. awesome. more cool stuff on their website: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
And these visual characters have various, context-dependent meanings.
In the Japanese system of hiragana, âăâ [ah] is the most flexible character.
Despite its simple sound, different inflections can express various human emotions: joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure.
As such, the character of âăâ [ah] must reflect the emotional nuances of its use in the highly context-dependent culture of Japan. People often use this character without realizing its various expressions.
To make them know this amazing feature, we proposed an object whose visual shape is the character âăâ [ah].
When people play with the object striking, bending, or rubbing, the various sounds of âăâ [ah] are expressed.
Through the communicative possibilities of âăâ [ah], we can learn to appreciate the nuanced relationship between a character and its meaning.â
Finalist at 20th International collegiate Virtual Reality Contest (IVRC2012).
Jury Prize at 18th Student CG Contest.
Awards for Excellence at 2012 Asia Digital Art Award.
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