Means of Production: Fabbing and Digital Art, my latest post for Rhizome was published this afternoon. With this text I've cast a pretty wide net and conducted a broad survey of fabrication in art, with particular attention paid to the RepRap project and the 2008 exhibits "C.STEM" and "Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen". I know enough about fabrication to be dangerous, so I sought a variety of input from several design thinkers such as Marius Watz, Bruce Sterling, Matias del Campo and Liav Koren (who is currently setting up a Toronto RepRap group). I was absolutely buried in information from these enthusiastic folks, and since I couldn't possibly squeeze it all into the Rhizome post I've decided to compile this collective wisdom into a set of liner notes. There is a lot of great content and links here - enjoy!

[Marius Watz with a pair of his milled MDF panels at "Code, Form and Space"]

Marius Watz

What kind of challenges did you encounter in curating "Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen"? How is exhibiting fabbed artifacts, and, the documentation of related process different than showcasing more traditional deployments of screen or interactive installation based software art?

My concern in putting together Generator.x 2.0 was to show that generative systems go beyond "screensavers" and purely visual abstraction. I also wanted to draw comparisons between use of parametric systems in architecture and visual art. Ultimately, digital fabrication allows for a software-based approach to physical production, meaning that computational processes can be used in all parts of the production. It's an ironic reversal of the last decade's transition towards the digital, for once it's a matter of bits becoming atoms instead of the other way around.

The workshop resulted in wide range of objects indicating new approaches to physical form based on generative systems. Unsurprisingly many were explorations of basic typology, but I think many contained the potential to be genuinely new and exciting forms. It's not a given that someone who works with software processes in the form of projections or installations will be able to produce interesting physical objects, but I think many of the participants and visitors to the exhibition were surprised and inspired by the outcome of the workshop.

As an artist, how has working with rapid prototyping influenced your thinking about code and craft?

Software and screen-based representation are the "defaults" in my work, so having access to physical fabrication processes allow me to challenge some of the basic assumptions. It also allows me to be more specific in my ideas about space since the virtual component is removed. On screen a form might be articulated in 3D space, but there are no constraints of gravity or materiality.

I'm finding that I have to rethink what the essential qualities are that I am trying to convey when I work with physical output. There is a definite sculptural element that is missing in my screen-based work, with the objects becoming real spaces rather than just visual compositions. I have also been experimenting with issues of scale, which is important since I am interested in presenting the viewer with an immersive experience of space rather than just pictures on walls.

[Postcard for "manufacTURINg" program at the 2008 Share Festival / photo: brucesflickr]

Bruce Sterling

How do you see distributed means of production challenging conventional thinking on the creation and display of art and design?

Bruce fired the following volley of responses in my direction:

• It's the generative means of production that are the key issue here. Generative art and design is alien to all conventional creative methods. It challenges them in the way that a kaleidoscope challenges a telescope.
• Machines like fabs seem marvelous, but they're rather simple and trivial. Software is not trivial. Software is an expression of creative will: software is words, it's lines of text, it's a series of commands.
• When you hook software directly to a fabricator for physical objects, we're into a space of forms that the human race has never seen.
• Imagine a three-dimensional kaleidoscope that can generate forms so complex that a coral reef looks like minimalism. In some ways that's a mere stunt, yet it also breaks the limits of the human creative imagination. Artists have always sought inspiration from found forms in nature. Now we've got a huge new arsenal of unnatural, software-based found forms.
• Rapid prototyping has many obvious and some subtle applications, but generative manufacturing is another arena entirely. Here rapid prototyping seems pretty simple, like a digital CD player, while generative is like a mixing and sampling deck. It's no accident that the generative art scene hangs out with techno musicians.
• The horizon for generative technique is to get over the rave-party psychedelia aspects. Adults will quickly tire of a mere kaleidoscope, and the thrill there is not going to last. The task is to find real-world applications for this new radical means of production. There may be many of those, and they may be big like in architecture, or there may be few and modest, like fabric design.

[Lasercutter at the Bauhaus / photo: spanpix]

Matias del Campo [see the Serial Consign interview with del Campo from last fall]

I'm in the midst of developing an overview of a few shows focused on fabricated artifacts. I thought you might have some recommendations or suggestions. Can you share some links and projects for me to investigate?

• Greg Lynn's The Predator (1999) - also documented here
• Greg Lynn's installation (2002) for Rendel and Spitz - documented here
• Roxy Paine's PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) (1999-2000) - discussed in relation to Simon Ingram's Drunkard's Walk (2008) rather nicely by Ethan Ham here
• Leah Raintree's Bloomfield collaboration with Ben Krone - documented here
• A good example of fabrication and affect is Technicolor Bloom (2008) by Brennan Buck with Rob Henderson and Studio Lynn - also documented here
• Greg Lynn and Fabian Marcaccio's SECCESSION (1999)
• Elena Manferdini's Merletti (2008) - documented here
• In addition to the Manferdini installation, the sci-ARC gallery exhibitions archive is loaded with great projects
• And to feature ourselves, Gradient Scale (2005) was a very extensive exploration on the issue of milling artifacts as matter of ornamentation and articulation of the surface - see also our Housing in Vienna exhibit (2008)
• The suckerPUNCH blog is a great resource in general

[Lovingly photographed lasercut detritus from Liav's archives]

Liav Koren

Some comments from Liav on reading an early draft of my Rhizome piece:

One of the things that I *do* like about it [fabrication], is that it *is* weird. I'm starting to think that one of the basic advantages Sterling might be bringing to these discussions is the ability to generate industrial strength quotients of weirdness. Because I look at 99% of the fabricated items/project/proposals out there, and they're all starting to look like the cultural equivalents of a "hello world" program. Right now there are initiatives at MIT and other places to create open-source biotech protocols. Oron Catts, the head of SymbioticA (he was here two summers ago and gave that workshop I was in) travels around the world talking about garage bio tech labs, and shows people how to make cheap DIY fume hoods for doing lab work in. Some other people are trying to get Open Nanotech up and running (which just seems like an even worse public health risk that the open biology - lab work is fucking *hard*, where as even if you can't make Grey Goo, who knows what breathing in nano-tubes will do to you in 20 years... no one. They've barely even been *known* for 20 years.) There's also Paul Rothemund, the DNA origami guy - one of my favorites.

All of which is to say, that even if only half of those initiatives amount to anything, they'll probably start to reach wide spread cultural saturation in maybe 30 years. At which point these boundaries between different notions of fabrication are just going to seem quaint - it'll all just be moving atoms around at different scales and with different tools. Some of those tools might be spinning bits of metal, some of them might live in your basement bio-reactor. Or a sterile vacuum chamber.