Hand Of The Machine
exhibition, Emerson Contemporary, 2020
I've spent countless hours watching my 3D printer work, fascinated by the process of hot plastic building layer upon layer. We're told this process is precise, predictable, infinitely repeatable—but that's only part of the story. Every 3D print carries good and bad traces of its making: a blob of plastic where the extruder hesitated, subtle warping from uneven cooling, physical evidence of communication glitches between myself, my computer and the printer. I don’t think that prints with traces of these failures are objects that should be discarded — to me these “failed” prints revealed something genuine about the process.
I began to see these anomalies not as problems in the system, but as part of the machine’s expression. So I started paying closer attention - trying to capture these imperfections through photography, drawing, and careful observation. What emerged was a feedback loop of interesting accidents. I would take these captured anomalies and feed them back into new designs, creating a dialogue between what I planned and what actually happened. The machine would interpret my interpretations of its own quirks, creating new variations that I would again explore. The works in this exhibition are the results of this looping process, structures across different types of media that are neither purely digital nor purely analog, but things that emerged from the reality of plastic meeting air in the physical world.
This project was included in the group exhibition Spacetime (x, y, z + t) at Emerson Media Arts Gallery in Boston, MA. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury and featured work by Katherine Mitchell DiRico (US), Zsuzsanna Segedi (HUN), Nicole L’Huillier (CL), Monika Grzymala (GER) as well as myself. Exhibition images from George Bouret Photography.
+ Curator Statement
+ Boston Globe Review
+ Boston Art Review Interview
+ Understanding The Work - Review
I began to see these anomalies not as problems in the system, but as part of the machine’s expression. So I started paying closer attention - trying to capture these imperfections through photography, drawing, and careful observation. What emerged was a feedback loop of interesting accidents. I would take these captured anomalies and feed them back into new designs, creating a dialogue between what I planned and what actually happened. The machine would interpret my interpretations of its own quirks, creating new variations that I would again explore. The works in this exhibition are the results of this looping process, structures across different types of media that are neither purely digital nor purely analog, but things that emerged from the reality of plastic meeting air in the physical world.
This project was included in the group exhibition Spacetime (x, y, z + t) at Emerson Media Arts Gallery in Boston, MA. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury and featured work by Katherine Mitchell DiRico (US), Zsuzsanna Segedi (HUN), Nicole L’Huillier (CL), Monika Grzymala (GER) as well as myself. Exhibition images from George Bouret Photography.
+ Curator Statement
+ Boston Globe Review
+ Boston Art Review Interview
+ Understanding The Work - Review
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Animation, made by layering relief prints of 3D-printed waste material.
Exhibition view.
Animation on screen,
9 x 12 in.
Detail.
Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 in.
Detail.
Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 in.
3D printed sculpture set, various sizes. These were designed to showcase the inner structure of a 3D print. The sculptures were continuously printed during the exhibition and free to take home for visitors.
Sculpture detail.
Exhibition view, 3D printer.