The Avant/Garde Diaries, an online interview magazine, recently posted a nice twofold profile of Make/BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder and his friend, artist Kevin Mack.
Frauenfelder first discovered Kevin Mack through his special effects work on the film Fight Club; however, it was Mack’s strictly artistic work that really piqued Frauenfelder’s interest. Mack’s art takes the vast and still uncharted area of digital technology and brings it into the physical world. The results are images printed on canvas which vacillate between abstraction and photorealism, and virtual sculptures transformed into the tangible via three-dimensional printing technology.
The short, entitled “Between Order and Chaos,” opens with a bit of background on the DIY/punk/zine aesthetic before Frauenfelder proceeds to introduce the visual effects supervisor and visual artist. Both Frauenfelder and Mack agree that we’ve only begun to grasp the fine art potential of 3D printing technology.
We’ve seen semi-sculptural 3D-printed objects before—including clocks, shoes and yes,
sculptures—but Mack’s work is decidedly more abstract. As he writes of the work pictured below,
An array of shapes form complex relationships through selective random happenstance and deliberate design. The forms are entangled and weave inside and outside together in purposeful and irrational ways.The apparently organized structural system provides conflicting stimuli. Rules are established but not adhered to. Identity and function appear determinable, but are not. Many internal details remain hidden from view. The object’s complete form is unknowable. It is a man made mystery.
The sculpture was created from constrained random implicit surfaces and procedurally derived structures. These were distorted with turbulent noise prior to extensive direct sculpting and manual manipulation.
Like a Rorschach ink blot, it is designed to make you see things from your own mind. What do you see?
As we saw yesterday, digital fabrication is increasingly a cost-effective, practical solution to many modern manufacturing quandaries. But just as the real-world applications of digital fabrication remains to be seen, so too does technology’s artistic potential remain all but limitless.
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