A few months ago I installed work in a small group exhibition with a few of my colleagues that work at Appalachian State. Our group of faculty and staff are interested in the impact of digital technology within our respective areas of research in art, design, industrial design, apparel, architecture, interior design, and how this work will shape our teaching for the many years to come. The show is currently up at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC. The particular gallery that our work is in is an incredibly beautiful space with large windows. You can access the website for our group show here and if you're interested in the specific details and process about my teapots you can watch the videos that I made on the process of making these pieces.
One of our group member Garner Dewey shot the images above this week. For more of his workcheck this out.
Yesterday and today, I ran my Tormach CNC for Chloe (a senior Sculpture student at AppState) and created this drilled cross stitch pattern in steel sheet. She is planning on pressing these sheets with steel hoops and then putting patina on them, and then stitching the pattern with thread. She has several of these to make and I'm helping out since our mill at school it too small to run the bigger designs. This one has over 2,000 holes so I ran the mill super slow and just let it peck away at the design. I ran part of it yesterday and then paused the machine at night and started it back up this morning when I took off to weld at school. I came back to a broken bit, so I had to re-run part of the program. I still broke a few more bits as I'm using #52 bits for this. Regardless, it came out nice and she can get to work now. She'll have several more designs to do, so I'm hoping to run some of these on the ShopBot at school so she can go bigger, and so she can babysit the router instead of me running these in my own shop when I have other jobs to do. I guess it's good that I can do the first ones to confirm that everything is working well.
Have you ever learned about something and wonder... "why haven't I seen this or been told about this before this point in my life?". Well today I stumbled onto information about artist, designer, architect, computer scientist, Ron Resch.
The video Paper and Stick above is stellar. He received his B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in the mid sixties and later to went on to teach at the University of Illinois-UC (Art and Computer Science) and later the University of Iowa (Computer Science) and Boston University (Computer Science). He later did consulting work and worked with NASA and on Star Trek the Motion Picture. What a career!
The egg he built above was a major undertaking. As the end of the film denotes, he started developing some of his calculations via computer. The feedback that he got from each development in his work and how he later applies it blows me away. He was so steady in his pursuit and again I assume this lead to the computer science gigs as a result of continuing to develop his work via computer.
Think about this... this is the beginning of algorithmic computer based design at this time. It gets better though...He modified a plotter to score and cut sheets of aluminum for the giant egg. Yes, that's right he modified/built a custom CNC machine to digitally fabricate the egg in 1975. The list of experts on his website and what they say about him is impressive.
I know there are many people folding paper and much research at MIT being done on the topic. I also know this was the basis of a lot of the early design work I was taught in college. The Bauhaus work was obviously a big influence of the Foundations program I went through. I also know a lot of Buckminster Fuller's work was influential to my Foundations education probably due to proximity of SIU-C to where I grew up and attended college. It's just interesting that this seems to be the "missing link" between my early education and my interests in technology, tools, craft, architecture, design, art , and digital fabrication. Well, this was just too good to not post about. Fascinating!! Ron Resch was the real deal!
We've been having fun in my casting course lately. The students are reinterpreting the cameo and making some new work utilizing 3D scanning and CNC milling. They learned how to scan and then how to use the Taig CNC to mill high density foam for making plaster molds for slush casting wax. Then they learned how to make investment molds from the waxes for lost wax/centrifugal casting. Students then have to combine these cast components with fabricated components. I'm anxious to see this new work in it's completed state.
