Another sculpture

Another piece from the MAD scanning day. This woman had a beautiful profile.

posted May 18, 2011 | Comments (0)

New sculpture

I just uploaded this file to Shapeways. It’s the first sculpture I’m making from the 95 face scans I did at Pratt, Google and MAD in March.

(After 8 years of fighting with 3d scan data to get it printable, and spending large chunks of my annual income on file engineering costs, I just discovered a combination of fixes in Rhino and the free version Netfabb that get my data to a print-ready state. If Netfabb basic would just add Boolean functionality, I’d be sending them flowers right now!)

posted May 17, 2011 | Comments (0)

MakerBot in the New York Times

The New York Times published this article, featuring Marius Watz and Kyle McDonald, to coincide with MakerBot’s Make-A-Thon at 3rd Ward this weekend.

I was disappointed to see that the comments were mostly knee-jerk criticisms of artists working with 3d printing, simply because the process uses plastic. As Kyle and others pointed out, boutique 3d printing actually has the potential to reduce plastics consumption, by allowing people to produce the exact item they want, in the exact quantities they want.

Still, I’m considering moving away from plastic for archival reasons. I was excited to see that Shapeways offers 3d printing in stainless steel and recycled glass – and now food-safe glazed ceramics!

posted May 16, 2011 | Comments (0)

Tom McCarthy talk at Pratt: Noise, Signal and Word

Tom McCarthy has been one of my favorite authors for years, ever since I found a copy of his novel Remainder in (I’m afraid) a remainder pile. This was before his work was justly recognized by the publishing industry. The art world was ahead, at least this time: his ’semi-fictitious network’ the International Necronautical Society has been in operation since 2000, and they have exhibited and conducted events at the Tate and ICA in London. McCarthy’s work now receives more of the attention it deserves, and his novel C was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

The INS once expelled a member “for the crime of not being dead”, only to reinstate him when he contracted cancer, “demanded restitution to his post and then died”. Most recently, they created something between a Burroughsian cut-up and a numbers station, broadcast from a gallery in Berlin.

Remainder is the best evocation of the process of art-making I have yet read. Its traumatized, amnesiac protagonist is propelled by a monumental impulse to reconstruct a scene: a place he has never been, but nevertheless remembers in an experience akin to deja vu. He expends great sums of money towards this uncertain end. Accomplishing his goal brings him no satisfaction; it only seems to damage him further, as he is driven to pursue his obsession to greater and greater heights. (Here’s a great interview with McCarthy about the novel.)

I didn’t realize that McCarthy was in New York, so I was really excited to hear that he was speaking at Pratt this month. His talk “Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works” elucidated some of the repeated themes of his novels and projects, including death, technology, repetition, broadcast and the radio. It traced a lineage from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus to Cocteau’s film Orphée, with stops for Freud, Joyce and Kraftwerk…

Referencing Rilke’s like “you built a temple deep inside their hearing”, McCarthy said: “The tall tree has become a pylon; the ear, a dish.” Moving on to Freud, he read from “Civilization and its Discontents” which famously describes technologically-enhanced humans as “prosthetic Gods”. “If you’ve got an artifical body part”, he said, “you’re an amputee. Like Orpheus, you’ve had your limbs ripped off.”

While I have read copious amounts on the linkages between photography and death, I hadn’t thought as much about similar connections with sound. Apparently, Alexander Graham Bell and his brother had a pact that whoever survived would build a machine to receive messages from the afterlife. Although his brother never called Alexander on the telephone, “the desire was there.” (Artist Laurent Montaron recently exhibited a piece dealing with the invention of the phonograph, which Edison famously suggested could be “a machine to record the last thoughts of the dying.”) He also described how middle-class parents at the turn of the century would record their children’s voices on a plate or roll. This was before penicillin, when child mortality was tragically high, and, he says, “the record plates themselves became crypts”. Citing Laurence Rickels’ text Aberrations of Mourning, he argues that although we may think of technology to record sound or vision as a defence against death, paradoxically “we end up building tombs”.

The talk touched on a number of other topics, including EVP, David Foster Wallace, Antigone, Burroughs, Quixote, Beckett, Nabokov, and some cutting and hilarious criticisms of the state of contemporary writing. I wish I could have taken McCarthy’s course on Catastrophe at the London Consortium. Failing that, I plan to keep the Brooklyn Public Library busy with inter-library loans for some time…

posted May 02, 2011 | Comments (0)

LIDAR scanning smoke and mist

This is an image from the UK-based ScanLAB projects. It’s a LIDAR scan of smoke and mist, made as research for a project called Slow Becoming Delightful.

It reminds me of my attempts to scan the Hudson river, which were not so successful; the water just registered as voids in the data. Interesting in itself, but not what I was going for.

posted April 21, 2011 | Comments (0)

More LIDAR work underway

I owe a big thank-you to AliceLabs, who kindly allowed me to use their StudioClouds software and plugins. I used the Studio Clouds plugin for 3d Studio Max to create the above render (click twice for a higher-res version). This was renderd from a LIDAR scan of a forest in upstate New York. I’ve been sitting on gigabytes of LIDAR and point cloud data like this for a couple of years, and haven’t had the tools to render them at print resolution until now.

Being able to render point cloud data right in 3d Studio Max and Maya has been amazing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with my neglected data now…

posted April 12, 2011 | Comments (0)

3d scanned portraits at the Museum of Arts and Design

Here is a link to a post by MAD’s Molly MacFadden — thanks Molly!

Below are some of Molly’s pictures from the day.

I’m slowly crunching through the data and will post some preliminary renders next. Thank you again to everyone at Polhemus for generously loaning me one of their FastSCAN COBRA handheld laser scanners. It’s been so much fun to be able to use one of these again!

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3d scanning at the Museum of Arts & Design, Tuesday 3/29

Tomorrow, March 29th, I will be scanning visitors to MAD’s Open Studios from 11am – 5pm. I will be using a Polhemus FastSCAN 3d laser scanner, which the company have generously loaned to me for a couple of weeks, so I can gather data for a new series of portraits.

If you’re in NYC and interested in participating, please email me at sophie @ sophiekahn.net (remove spaces) to reserve a time. The process will take about 15 minutes, and I’ll be scanning your head and shoulders. You will just need to complete a standard model release form.

For full visitor information, click here: http://www.madmuseum.org/visit

Feel free to send this post to anyone who might be interested!

posted March 28, 2011 | Comments (0)

Laser-cutting experiments

These are sheets of laser-cut perspex. Each one is cut with a cross-section of the same point cloud file I have been using for these experiments. I am wondering about options to make them more conducive of light: optical adhesive or mineral oil both might work.

posted March 15, 2011 | Comments (0)

New sculpture render

I have also been using Maya to experiment with new finishes for cast metal sculptures. I would love to make this piece in polished bronze. I’ve smoothed the file, to give the data a liquid quality that I think would work well with this surface.

posted February 22, 2011 | Comments (0)