digiplasty
project details
digiplasty collaboration No. 1 began as a desire to move with what we saw as the natural, computer facilitated, internalization of sculpture. With use of computer aided design software, sculptors can now realize and share, formal object based ideas nearly as quickly as they conceive them. Employing the www, we can near instantly share such ideas globally. Through digiplasty we sought to exploit this potential system of object development and sharing to create a new, cooperative form of sculpture activity.
digiplasty is a project that serves to test the fruitfulness of collaborative digital sculpture. In the beginning, we were unsure if the activity would even be interesting to us. After engaging in the work, our growing interest in its continuation confirmed the project's potential. We also sought to explore the possibility of a "formal" communication, a loose dialog where text and conventional verbal structures are traded for simple geometries. Through "tactile empathy" the geometry of objects and their surfaces, supposes an infinite potential of suggestion through form.
process
digiplasty is largely process driven, to the degree that the documentation of our process becomes the only art that we can share with a wider audience.
Our process is simple. One sculptor begins an object then passes it to his collaborator for further development of the form. The collaborator works on the object, then returns it. The process is repeated until one of the sculptors "calls it". This back and forth passing of the object grows a family or line of objects, described as an object series.
Our documentation process is
as follows:
object series
digiplasty is composed of groups of object series. Each series of digiplasty
objects is titled digiplasty and numbered appropriately for the order in which
we started that series. Therefore, the first digiplasty series is called digiplasty
No. 1. These series are also referred to more simply as d, and the appropriate
number, so that for instance digiplasty No. 1 is simply called d1.
object passes
The starting object of any digiplasty series is called p1, for the first passing
of that object from the initiating sculptor to his collaborator. The object
is documented each time it is passed, and so subsequent passes would be named
and saved as, p2, p3, p4, etc. To distinguish between any two objects in the
over all project we refer both to the series in which the object resides as
well as its pass position within that series. Therefore, the first object
in the d1 series is called d1_p1.
sub/objects
The object can be documented at anytime, and if documentation occurs between
passes the resulting object is considered a sub/object and named for the two
passes it falls between. Therefore, the first sub/object falling between the
third and forth passes (p3 and p4) would be called p3_p4a. Any subsequent
sub/objects documented between those same two passes would be named to signify
the place in order that they were documented, p3_p4b, p3_p4c, etc.
Some sub/objects are simply extra objects clearly documented in the series.
However, a sub/object can also become the starting place for a new digiplasty
series. This new series would be named for the series from which it branched
and would be lettered in the order that it branched. As an example, the first
sub/object that we pursued as a new series branching from the d4 series is
called d4a, or digiplasty No. 4a.
see the object series line charts.
techniques
Computing is essential to the
digiplasty project. Beyond the profound future-potential for object generation
and communication, the fluidity and speed of digital media made the project
possible. Our ability to work on, save and quickly pass objects from one site
to another facilitated our project, and enabled us to recognize its importance.
digiplasty takes advantage of and brings further attention to the mutability
and porosity that characterizes new form art.
For this first digiplasty collaboration, we chose to limit the modeling application
to just one software package. We chose Nendo (Japanese for clay) by Nichimen
Graphics for its no frills, highly intuitive modeling environment. Modeling
is done in a near modeless interface that provides a toolset appropriate to
the selected elements. We found that the operations were generative; design
decisions and geometry interplayed in an analogous way to "craft" process.
The choice of software proved very important and far more interesting and
telling then we imagined it would. As Nendo is almost void of highly sophisticated
manipulation tools, and in a very real way insists that you take control,
manipulating the most elemental of geometric elements to manually model what
it is you want to form, Nendo proved a truth serum of sorts. Without the aid
of any gratuitous tools like real-time Boolean operations or even the use
of metric transformations, Nendo insured that if we wanted to form something
(say something), then we would do so as directly as possible.
This project is is at one level a critique of state of the art modeling environments,
a counter example to the trend towards an increasingly AI driven, if not autonomously
controlled art reality. Our use of Nendo to create the digiplasty objects
tells of our desire to retain as much control over the outcome of our work
within the context of production.
The final documentation, which exists as the so-called artwork, we developed using screen-captures to derive the images, Macromedia Flash to stage the visuals and give them a bit of interactivity, and Alias|Wavefront Maya to animate and compose the final objects for VRML output. What we see as the real art exists in digital form on the machines in our studios, one full set of the objects on each of our systems. The work is true digital sculpture and though we share a desire to document the objects physically using rapid prototyping techniques, this would clearly be simple documentation: the analogous representation of the digital sculpture.