CHAPTER 14 — Metaphors to Sculpture
7-minute read
While the idea of making has evolved radically through two revolutions — the Industrial and the Digital. However, the kinds of making remain relatively fixed by the properties of the material world. We can manipulate by hand, machine, digital interface, or some hybrid among these. No matter the means, material processes generally organize themselves into manifestations of addition, subtraction, assembly, or substitution. We’ll explore these below, in examples from history, basic 3D design studio projects, and digital iterations both physical and metaphorical.
Addition | Modeling
An Additive work builds a malleable material up through a process of Modeling. In traditional tactile work, we can characterize modeling as building or sculpting using soft, hand-workable materials such as clay, wax, paper pulp, and polymers.
Ceramic work is among the oldest forms of art which still have a strong working tradition to the present day. The earth-based clays they are made from can be air-dried or fired in a kiln for durability. In a 3D design class, plastilina oil-based clays are popular because of their re-workability. They never cure, which can be a blessing or a curse.
Digital sculpting
In modeling software, a modeler can use soft-selection tools to push and pull a volume much the same way we manipulate clay. ZBrush is a sculpting-centric modeling program in which we can create texture and detail. It can accept an imported model for advanced modeling, in the clay-sculpting sense of the word.
Booleans
When creating a Boolean Union, it’s analogous to merging two lumps of clay together to form one uniform mass.
3D printing at a massive scale
Additive modeling in the digital world is not limited to analogy, however. Anish Kapoor teamed up with Factum Arte in Spain to explore the simultaneously geometric and organic formal possibilities in vector-driven cement pumps, like a gigantic 3D printer. At a more precise resolution, we have adapted this to clay. It is essentially the same as coil-pot making. It’s an additive build-up of deposition material in a spiral, only at a much finer resolution. This brings a modern twist to the making of clay vessels, one of our earliest and therefore most important technical innovations. Unfold’s innovation, seen here, represents a conceptual melding of the oldest and newest of human technologies.
Subtraction | Carving
A Subtractive work reveals the form hidden inside a larger volume through a process of Carving. In traditional sculpture, durable and relatively homogeneous materials such as stone or wood are dug, drilled, chiseled, whittled or otherwise reduced with hand-held or machine tools to discover that form within.
Not surprisingly, subtractive stone-based sculpture began in the Stone Age. The basic means remain unchanged to this day: digging out a softer material using a harder one. The unfinished Slaves of Michelangelo illustrate the process. Given the relatively high costs of raw materials, the use of plaster as a substitute for Michelangelo’s coveted white Carrara marble is seen in subtractive exercises in a 3D design course.
Booleans
In digital modeling, we can find a rough analogy to carving in the Boolean Difference or Subtract tool used to compound polygonal volumes.
CNC routing and milling
We can use digital models to numerically guide milling machines. The subtractive process of carving precise geometries in the marbles prized in centuries gone by provides another blending of the ancient with the future.
Assembly | Manipulation | Found Object | Assemblage | Construction
Assembly is the most far-reaching process in the material pantheon. It encompasses the Manipulation of existing things through the use of Found Objects, Assemblage, and Construction. We can work with almost any material in such a way. Processes in this category came into favor in the 20th Century largely through developments in Synthetic Cubism and Dada.
Artworks, especially in architecture, have long been constructed (that is, made of a grouping of non-homogeneous materials), but the self-consciousness of Assembly processes in the last century is best seen in the absurd juxtapositions found in the early Readymades of Duchamp. Sculpture was never the same, with welding, gluing, stapling and stacking found in a large measure of sculptural output ever since. In a 3D design course, found object exercises usually stretch a student into aspects of metaphor and transformation such as the exercise seen here, wherein students were told to use a tool, not to manipulate a medium, but to become a medium itself.
Combine and booleans
Maya’s Combine command takes the simple juxtaposition of elements and turns it into something the software recognizes as a single element. It is a digital modeling analog to Assembly.
Separately modeled elements undergo Boolean Union operations to make one object in a student project. From a studio by the author.
Found objects and libraries
Downloading and manipulating digital files of pre-defined models is the digital equivalent of found-object manipulation. The interactive nature of gaming and web design, in conjunctionw with 3D modeling, creates opportunities for artists to generate assembly environments like the Spore Creature Creator, where the spectator becomes a participant in the assembly process using a library of elements. Spore creature creators have to date developed and uploaded more than double the number of species found on planet Earth!
Sites like Thingiverse and Prusa’s Printables offer libraries of models, which user communities often remix and re-share under Creative Commons licensure. Remixing often employs mesh editors, which occupy a different corner of the 3D ecosystem than modeling software. Meshmixer is still a popular mesh editor in the maker community, even though Autodesk no longer supports it. Go to the Wayback Machine and you can still download it for Windows or Mac.
Substitution | Casting
Substitution is a process of creating a form in an original, intermediate material, in order to recreate that form in a second, final material. Called Casting, this traditional process usually requires an original that has been formed Additively in a soft material like clay or wax, an intermediate mold of that form created in latex, plaster or other harder material. We finally introduce a more durable material such as metal or a resin polymer into the mold to generate the finished product. It typically follows that positive-negative-positive pattern irrespective of material. When the mold is reusable, casting has the advantage that many final works can be created from one original, the sculptural equivalent of printmaking.
Mold-making
Bronze casting has been the traditional medium for Substitution for ages, but innovation in material science has led to a large palette of possible choices. Rachel Whiteread has gotten a lot of career mileage out of a disarmingly simple concept: working with spaces we take for granted: under a chair, in a stairwell. She presents a mass-void inversion though mold-making, giving presence to these forgotten spaces. Casting exercises usually use liquid-to-solid media like plaster, but the conceptually interesting student work seen here casts the liquid found in common drink packages, using said package as mold and freezing it (and yes, it melts, but that’s one of the conceptual points).
3D scanning
3D scanning is a way of acquiring, storing, and manipulating dimensional data from the tactile world. It is the digital equivalent of mold-making. In a famous reference object, the Stanford Bunny dataset was scanned from a common terra-cotta garden tschochke and can be found at the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository. Led by Brian Curless and Marc Levoy, the Stanford team went on to create a major work in their seminal scans of Michelangelo’s work, the process of which is illustrated at their website.
Mesh of the Stanford Bunny scan