The ComputerSculpture Blogspace

Digital Stone Exhibition Doland Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai China

The world’s center of gravity has been tilting eastward lately, and the digital art movement reflects that with this ambitious exhibition, in three Chinese venues, sponsored by design software powerhouse Autodesk, whose CEO, Carl Bass, appreciates the challenge posed by artists using computers in unusual ways. The Beijing show, at the Today Art Museum, ended in October, but I got to Shanghai in time for the November 6 opening at the Doland Museum of Modern Art, on Duolun Road in Shanghai. This little street with its increasingly rare old low-rise buildings is quiet for that bustling city, due to a prohibition on (most) 4-wheeled traffic, and large granite pieces by the show’s four featured participants—Bruce Beasley, Jon Isherwood, Kenneth Snelson, Robert Michael Smith—were displayed prominently along it, where passersby ranging from dog-walkers to wedding parties and fashionistas felt free to engage with them. These sculptors had been given the opportunity to produce large scale stone pieces in China, based on digitally-mastered macquettes produced on a smaller scale with 3-D printers. These were sent to a stone-carving factory in Southern China and “pointed up” (enlarged) by traditional hand methods. (While it’s also possible to carve stone with specialized computer-controlled milling machines, it turns out to be a lot more expensive, while the Chinese stonecarvers did an amazingly good job of interpreting these unfamiliar abstract forms.)

All four artists rose admirably to the challenge, producing pieces that translated well from small plastic parts to large stone ones—something that’s not as easy to do as it might seem. Beasley, a technically-adventurous artist who has been using computers to design sculpture since the ’eighties, chose to work with a restricted set of basic forms, in this case slightly lentoid disk shapes and bent tubular elements, using the computer to arrive at exactly the right combination of shapes by trial and error, eliminating the work of producing mock-ups in physical materials. Here’s an article I wrote about Beasley’s 2005 retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California .

Ken Snelson, who is mostly known for his “tensegrity” structures, which use tensioned cable to float structural steel members in seemingly impossible fashion, drew upon his deep meditations on atomic structure to produce a remarkably different series where weightiness is as important an element as is the weightlessness of his previous work. They also play upon a familiar Chinese sculptural trope (originally imported from Europe): the “mystery balls” nesting carved balls within balls, although in Snelson’s interpretation the concentric spheres are not cut free of each other.

Jon Isherwood’s stone pieces were the most diverse of the lot, playfully combining stripes and scales, with gently rippled surfaces intersecting more deeply carved and patterned ones, or erupting as bulbous protrusions. More than the other sculptors in the group, he experimented with various different stones and surface finishes including polish, which brings out the color in the material much more strongly than leaving the surface matte. This let him use the contrast between matte and polished areas effectively, as with the bottle-shaped component in “Tellers of Tales.”

Of the four featured sculptors, the work of Robert Michael Smith comes closest to my own aesthetic preoccupations, although he interprets natural forms abstractly where I use them directly. So while no particular natural objects are actually identifiable in his work, it has an organic quality that both unifies it and sets it apart from culturally-based art, giving it a timeless quality that doesn’t rely on a social context to communicate its deeply-rooted beauty. A master of interpenetrated forms, his pieces often resemble a frozen sequence of unfolding motions—budding, growing, segmenting, or dancing—as captured by a stroboscopic 3-D camera. Not surprisingly, he is also an animator, which allows his objects to shed the fixed aspect, to move and metamorphose like the subjects of an alien nature documentary.

The scaled-up stone works also filled the bottom floor of the Doland Museum, a Bauhaus-style building that somehow manages to coexist happily with the traditional architecture that surrounds it. On the floor above was the “e-form” part of the show; a collection of digitally-mediated sculpture, animations, and graphics by a fairly large group of international artists. Some of them were familiar to me from the Intersculpt shows in France (see blog) but others were new, like Jesse Small, who, since he lives part-time in China in order to take advantage of its facilities for having things made cheaply there in plastic, porcelain, and other materials, was able to attend the opening. He contributed hanging pieces loosely based on Chinese lanterns, with a plasma-cut steel structure at the core supporting injection-molded modular plastic components in the popular “lucky” red color. This modularity made it possible for him to construct a site-specific installation around a spiral stairwell, linking the transparent plastic elements into larger units which partially screened the space but let festive red light through.

A couple of the artists, Mary Bates Neubauer and Paul Higham, used complex datasets like stock market dividend and hog futures yields, or wave readings from the Tsunami of 2005 as inputs for creating digital sculpture and graphics, resulting in some surprisingly simple and elegant forms and images. I’m not sure how much interpretation goes into making art this way, but Neubauer’s results tended to be delicate and flowerlike, which Higham’s were more massive and mechanical-looking. Elona Van Gent took another approach, using high-tech tools to produce a creature that might have stepped out of the work of her fellow-Netherlander, the medieval master painter Hieronymus Bosch. (Navigating her site’s a little tricky; you have to click various parts of the pictured pair of pants to get to the unipod, duopod, tripod, quadropod and n-pod categories into which she divides her work.)

Of the people I knew already, Christian Lavigne contributed something different from anything I’d seen him do before—a fantasy landscape with mountains, bridges, and the figures of horses. I thought it worked quite well in the white plastic build material used by the Dimension 3-D printer (the use of which was contributed by one of the show’s sponsors) that built many of the works in show. By way of contrast, Mary Visser continues to develop themes she’s been working with for some time—the use of repeating and rearranged human figures as abstract elements in assemblage—but the new pieces she sent to China show major progress in refining the already-impressive colored and coated surfaces that make her work stand out in the mostly monochrome crowd. Michael Rees, another pioneer of the digital sculpture movement, was represented by several signature pieces that brought to mind a pair of gymnasts who have been working together (and with a horse) for so long that their bodies have merged into one another’s. An animation he provided was helpful in imagining how such a composite might act. Dan Collins, an old friend from the ISC and Siggraph’s Guerilla Studio, presented self portraits based on manipulated 3-D scans, while Keith Brown, one of the UK’s foremost digital sculptors, sent in an interesting openwork piece that exploited the ability of the additive 3-D printer to produce geometries of great complexity as easily as it builds something solid and simple.

There were also some people represented here whose work I hadn’t encountered before. Barry X Ball’s “Screaming Portrait of Matthew Barney” pursues the artist’s seeming obsession with the autour of the “Cremaster” cycle to the point of outrage—the subject seeming to object rather strenuously to being flayed, eviscerated, and nailed to a board for display. Jon Monaghan’s “Monstrance” is an interesting take on that sunburst-shaped article of Eucharistic adoration, resembling a prickly sea cucumber or a mutant (monster?) hedgehog. He also produced an animation called “Jesus, Jesus Christ” which also featured an animate object verging on creaturehood, which seemed to be suffering as it writhed on the screen, although perhaps more from peristaltic blockage than the sins of Mankind.

Greg Lock, an artist who likes to toy with the elusive line between analog and digital reality, used a scanner to create a highly pixelated version of an actual log, then replicated it in a way that rendered each pixel as a rectangular element, which he painted by hand in different colors. David Morris, who has been working with digital media for some time, sent in “Matador’s Cape” a simple but handsome piece in black ABS plastic which used the artifacts of the digital printing process to add detail without distracting from the form.

I could go on listing art and artists—there were more here, including myself—I contributed a couple of pieces combining various natural forms with integral photo-textures which I built on a color 3-D printer from Z-corp—but if you’ve read this far you deserve a break. Suffice it to say that this was a great show giving an excellent view of what’s happening currently in the world of digital sculpture. As I write this, the Shanghai show is about to close, but it’s traveling to Chongqing next, where it will be at the Jinse Gallery there until the middle of January 2009. My hat goes off to the organizers, especially Robert Smith, who worked his butt off collecting, creating, and building the art, dealing with artists, officials, and media, as well as to the presenters and sponsors who made it all possible.

Here’s some video coverage of the event from Shanghai’s English-language TV station. And here’s a link to the exhibit’s official site, with lots more pictures.

Andrew Werby text and photography

Siggraph 2008

I haven’t attended Siggraph, the big summer computer-graphics conference and exposition, in a while so I made time for its 2008 incarnation in L.A. I’ve been to Siggraph a couple of times before, and always found interesting things to feed my thoughts during the rest of the year—happily, this year’s show was no exception. If you’ve never been, it’s part trade show, part art exhibition, science fair, jobs fair, academic symposium, and general geek-fest.

The world of computer graphics, widely defined, has grown so huge and diverse that what started out as a small gathering of enthusiasts for an obscure artistic/scientific pursuit has grown into a huge venue embracing worlds as diverse as Hollywood film-making, game development, print advertising, video animation, product prototyping, 3-D visualization, computer programming, and website construction. Somehow, Siggraph manages to straddle them all, and provide something for everyone.

The show seemed more compact than in the past, either because of America’s current economic woes, or consolidation in the industry necessitating fewer booths. The “Guerilla Studio”, where one is able to participate in activities like scanning a part, designing a lenticular placard, or seeing ones 3-D models built with a 3-D printer shared the main exhibition space with the art show and the vendors, instead of being tucked away in separate rooms of their own, as had been the case in previous shows. Some of the people demonstrating odd projects (a favorite part of the show for me) were also there, although some were placed outside in an annex. In the Studio, I was fortunate enough to meet Dennis Dollens, who embodies the original techno-artistic spirit of this event. From his deep analysis of biological form, he has extracted algorithms that create spookily natural-looking “biomimetic” trees (which he sells to people making games and movies) as well as twisted “digital-botanic” structures that appear to have evolved under the influence of powerful mutagens. There was also someone there demonstrating the Gigapan system for creating panoramic photos that were huge and seamless. It involves a special camera mount and some software, but not a lot of expense, and includes membership in a site that allows participants to share, exchange and even sell their panoramas.

Projects in the Tech Demos area included a landscape generator set up like a bar, where one could order a mixture of plants, earth, sun, moon, sky, and water, each quantified by bottles of liquid set in a weighing station. When these ingredients were agitated in a cocktail shaker, a unique landscape would appear on the monitor, with all elements in the desired proportions. Michela Magab was demonstrating a music-sorting system, which could instantly match an excerpt with a vast collection of audio stored in a database, to identify copyright violations, plagiarism, or simply to find pieces similar to those one enjoyed previously. Ph.D. student Taisuck Kwon brought a flayed robotic face capable of showing various emotions with programmed activation of artificial musculature while Jonathan Chertok was displaying a set of rapidly-prototyped versions of classical mathematical models. Another Japanese group had made a “friendly” robot with doll-like features and a soft feminine voice that I found scarier than most movie monsters but maybe that’s just me…

Some projects were educational in intent, like the Calakmul simulation game by ArcVertuel featuring the ancient Mayan site as the background for a videogame-style quest intended for a kiosk in a children’s museum, or the more ambitious “Rome Reborn” which allows one to “walk through” seven thousand digitally-reconstructed buildings of the ancient city, as it appeared in AD 320. Others, like Erik Dyer’s modern 3-D zoetrope in which solid objects produced via Rapid Prototyping come to life on turntables seemed basically artistic, although they may point the way towards new techniques in film-making. Interactivity and haptics (tactile feedback) were also a major focus in the tech demonstrations, with some devices, like the “Butterfly Haptic” trying for a new way to relate to objects previously only seen on a monitor, or pointing the way towards remote-controlled sex (Emotional Touch) and using touch-feedback to add a novel, if not altogether comfortable, dimension to users’ interactions (“Ants in the Pants” I especially liked the exuberant sculpting of the “Infinite 4-D fish” by Yoichiro Kawaguchi of the University of Tokyo which while reminiscent of Takashi Murakami’s work in its bright colors and slick surfaces, managed to restrain the “super-cute” content elements that some seem to like but tend to make me gag.

The art show, which had been inspirational in the past, was a bit flat this year, with few examples of sculpture shown despite the spread of 3-D printing and affordable CNC equipment. Perhaps it was the choice of theme: the idea of Slow Art doesn’t exactly set pulses racing. Bathsheba Grossman’s new work in direct-metal RP was an exception—her topographically complex yet pleasing forms had a solidity and timelessness rare in a realm dominated by ephemeral materials and artistic fads. Much of the space was taken up with a display of skyscraper models, which, while they demonstrate how RP techniques have taken hold in the architectural modeling field, didn’t exactly break new ground in art. I liked the large pierced panels created by Erwin Hauer and Enrique Rosado using CNC milling, which, though reminiscent of other work in the math-art field, did show how this sort of thing might be integrated into an architectural setting.

Out on the expo floor, a wide range of vendors competed for the attention of the passing throngs. Motion capture was a big deal here, since by tracking targets placed on a live actor, a lot of tedious animation can be bypassed, and the motions directly mapped to a digitally-created image in real time. There’s also facial mo-cap (as it’s familiarly called) exemplified by the “alter ego” system which can quickly and automatically keep track of the shape changes in an actor’s face and apply them to any sort of animated character. The latest systems dispense with the targets, and manage to follow the motions of a digital image. I was impressed by the work of some Japanese investigators from the University of Tsukuba in the tech demo area, who had figured out how to analyze the motions of a hand captured on video, which they used to control a “copycat” robotic hand in near real time.

Much of the expo space was taken up by major software producers demonstrating their newest products on big screens to scores of seated viewers happy to get off their feet for a while. AutoDesSys, makers of FormZ, was premiering BonZai 3-D, trying for a product that is simpler and easier to use while perhaps more “geometrically robust” than the flagship product. Other software developers are thinking along the same lines. At a much smaller booth, I was able to get a personal demo of MOI, short for “Moment of Inspiration” from Michael Gibson, who wrote the program himself, and could explain everything about it. Having been largely responsible for creating Rhino3d for Robert McNeel, he struck out on his own to make a simpler, faster, more affordable 3-D modeling program for designers and artists, using Rhino’s model of an extended free beta period and active user forum to refine the interface and root out bugs. After years of this, MOI is finally being sold instead of given away, although you can still download a 30-day demo and tell everybody what you think of it.

I was interested to see a demo of T-splines for Rhino which helps Rhino deal with organic geometries by allowing T-joints instead of the rigid grid topography that characterizes Rhino’s NURBS, where every spline must cross every other to create a valid surface. They were also talking about using the program to create NURBS surfaces from polygon meshes, which would be worth the price of admission right there if it worked smoothly.

A 2-D program called Toonboom, used for producing several of the animated sit-coms popular on TV, was showing off a reasonably-priced “Studio” version aimed at the masses huddled around YouTube, yearning to produce their own cartoons. The demo made it look reasonably easy to use, but they always do that…I was also intrigued by Mathematica, a multi-faceted set of applications, widgets, and libraries which has survived for 20 years by taking a different approach than most companies—assuming that their users are smart and willing to learn new tricks. Since the academic pricing is good, it would make sense for bright students, teachers, or researchers in a number of technical fields, like Mensa in a jewelbox.

Several companies were showing off 3-D scanners of various sorts. Immersion had their latest Microscribe, and the RSI laser that mounts on it, enabling a user to capture various angles of their models intuitively, positioning the laser by hand. It’s a proven solution (and one I already sell), but it was nice to see how easy it is to use. I was able to see the NextEngine scanner digitize a small part, and was impressed that it worked as well as it did. But the most exciting development was Creaform’s new VIU hand-held color scanner, which does a super job of capturing geometry as well as the photo-textures it automatically maps to the surfaces. It requires “targets”—small reflective dots applied to a large or complex model—to register a series of different scanning passes, but this allows objects of considerable size to be captured, as well as multisided objects requiring multiple points of view for a complete scan. They were able to show digitizations they had done of very complicated parts, like a tree with all its leaves, and a huge multi-level fountain, with multiple sculptural figures in place. Of all the things I saw at Siggraph, this is the one I most wanted to take home with me .

While nobody was trying to sell CNC machines to this crowd, there were several vendors of additive RP machines at the show, including Z-corp and Objet. Z-corp machines work by ink-jet printing a binder solution into a bed of powder, which slowly sinks on its piston as successive layers of powder are applied and consolidated by the binder. Since the part being built is always supported by the powder that surrounds it, it’s not necessary to provide the extra supports required by most other systems, which saves time and effort. And since one is ink-jet printing anyway, it’s possible to add color at the same time in a controllable way, even to the extent of printing color photos on the sides of the part. But the part as printed lacks strength, and must be impregnated with some kind of resin or wax before it’s good for much, while the surface is always a bit grainy. Objet was showing their Polyjet system, which gives much smoother and more durable results, but not in full color. They have, however, the ability to print in more than one material at a time, so bicolored parts are possible. While the process requires supports, it can build them in a material which can be dissolved without harming the material you wish to keep. It also allows you to use rubbery materials with varying durometers (degrees of softness) so that humanoid parts could be made with hard bones, for example, in soft flesh, all at the same time.

As well as companies trying to sell RP equipment, there were others trying to sell it as a service. Shapeways had an interesting concept, providing a wizard on their site which lets users construct objects from lines of text, that (for a price) they could then have built with a 3-D printer, and have shipped to them. While not many options were available yet, this is a compelling business model, allowing people to produce personalized gifts without the requirement of craft skills.

Not only were companies there trying to sell things, quite a few organizations viewed this event as an opportunity for recruitment. Numerous schools were there pitching their audio-visual, computer-animation, and game development curricula, such as Cogswell College, Collins College, UArts in Pennsylvania, Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, and the oddly-named DigiPen Institute of Technology in Washington. Turbosquid and Renderosity were promote their online “communities”, where people can sell digital models to one another, and of course Siggraph itself was soliciting members for its own Digital Arts Community site. Several big software and animation houses were looking for employees (mostly software engineers) and even the U.S. Mint was there with some Phantom haptic arms from Sensable Technologies looking for a few good traditional medallic artists willing to use digital tools to create coin sculptures.

If there was any noticeable trend to spot here, it’s the new prominence of stereoscopic display systems, mostly based on polarized stereoscopic images and shutter-glasses. Of the two, the shutter-glasses work best, although they cost more and are more difficult to implement. The old style red-blue anaglyphic system seems to be on its way out, which I don’t mind much, since it never really worked very well. It has been replaced by polarized stereoscopy, familiar to those who have visited Disneyland in the last decade or so, which works by projecting two rolls of film (or video streams) that were shot from 2 viewpoints that differ by the interocular distance. The images taken by each camera are filtered through a polarizing lens on the projector, so each is only visible to one eye, when you’re wearing the special glasses that block out the left image for the right eye and vice-versa, while letting in the image corresponding to the viewpoint it was shot from. The shutter glasses accomplish basically the same thing but more positively, by winking each eye alternately on and off very quickly, while images intended for one eye only alternate on the screen. Persistence of vision makes the 3-D illusion work, since the eye holds onto the image it’s given without realizing that it has been turned off for a tiny moment. The brain takes in the different input from each eye and creates a 3-D image, as it does for normal vision.

One company, Digital Ordnance, had stereo cameras aimed at the crowd, and were projecting our large-scale 3-D images right back at us on the walls of their booth. It was a pretty convincing illusion, once I put on the glasses. They say they can provide a complete capture, storage, and projection system for $60k. Since movie theater owners are desperately looking for something that will get people off their couches and back into the theaters, more and more of them are equipping their venues for 3-D polarized display, shutterglasses being impractical for a large audience. The success or failure of the current crop of 3-D movies will probably determine if this trend will continue or be abandoned like the anaglyphic 3-D system of the 1950s. The price of 3-D digital projectors for individual users is also dropping, with one company, Lightspeed Design, introducing the DepthQ system designed to work with shutter glasses and able to project a high-definition 12-foot (diagonal) stereo image, for less than $6k.

Of all the companies vying to be at the forefront of 3-D digital content creation, Eon Reality seems to have the most going for it. They have made it their mission to conquer the world of immersive 3-D, using it for marketing, education, training, and entertainment. At the Siggraph show, they were showing a full-sized Porsche automobile projected on a semitransparent semicircular screen, a 3-D image that worked without glasses. The restrictions of their booth didn’t allow them to present the full range of what they have developed, so the day after Siggraph closed, I went down to their Irvine headquarters to attend their World IDC Symposium, in order to check out some of the other technology they’ve come up with.

I was not disappointed. These people have been working at this for a while, have written software and assembled hardware that allows them to create immersive 3-D content in a variety of forms. The meeting was addressed at times by a convincing 3-D projection of a speaker, who was able to sense and react to the audience without actually being present. They had 3-D TV working, with wireless shutter glasses that felt light and comfortable. They had a system for projecting movies into a heads-up display that fit in a pair of eyeglasses. They’ve developed web-based software, Eon Human, to generate multiple views of a user’s own face from a single 2-D image, useful for creating quick avatars in an online multiplayer game. They had software that let them make changes to a virtual 3-D environment and render them instantaneously, without the lag time typical of 3-D rendering programs.

Most impressive of all, they had constructed a space (the “cave” aka ICUBE™) where multiple projectors created an almost palpable 3-D image for a shutter-glasses and headset-equipped viewer. The headset oriented the view to the viewer by tracking the direction of view, while the shutter glasses created a very convincing 3-D effect—an exploded view of a jet engine with all the parts floating in space right in front of me. (The main problem they had with it was preventing disoriented users from crashing through a wall). For companies needing to train their employees in the use or repair of complicated equipment, where the equipment itself would be too complex or expensive to work with, for schools needing a way to break through the ennui of the traditional lecture format and engage their students more directly, for marketeers wanting to break through the clutter of competing trade-show exhibits, for applications of the future like virtual tourism and 3-D telepresence, these would be the folks to contact first.

Siggraph’s 36th annual event will be in New Orleans next summer, making it more accessible to people in other parts of the country. To join, exhibit your work, or otherwise get involved, you can contact Siggraph ’09.

Intersculpt 2007

I was a part of this one, coming to France to participate in this exhibition and conference, part of a series of similar events that has been going on for several biennial cycles now. There were a wide range of presentations and works spread out over the week and two venues, and I missed the first day, but the parts I saw were pretty interesting. The exhibition consisted of a number of vitrines containing small RP pieces, plus some larger pieces on plinths, and a nearly life-sized foam sculpture by Dan Collins’ “Twister” (a full-body scan of the artist twisted in a software program) that had been carved in France, using a robotic arm mounted with a rotary spindle, from a digital file sent from the USA. Many of the pieces in the cases, including mine, had been transmitted this way, by ftp file transfer, and were then built for the show in France by 3-D printers. This is great from an artist’s point of view, eliminating hassles with art shipment companies and customs that take a lot of the fun out of showing sculpture abroad. A couple of RP (Rapid Prototyping) machines were there, cranking out parts while we watched: a Z-corp machine that uses an incrementing powder-bed printed in layers with glue by an ink-jet process, and a Stratasys FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) machine that’s more like a computerized hot glue gun, tracing contours with layers of two types of material, one for the model and another for the support structure that holds disparate pieces together during the building process. There was also someone with an Inspeck scanner, an instantaneous white-light device that’s specialized for the capture of human heads (an ancient tradition revived!) I let them do it to me; the results were frighteningly realistic—I’m thinking of using it for a Halloween mask…

The conference in Nancy, focusing on the biomorphic aspect of things, included some scholarly lectures (mostly in French) on such topics as Classical chimerae, used as decorative elements in Greek and Roman art, embryology and mythological monsters, advances in medical imaging, and theories of growth and form. There were also videophone presentations done from remote locations, featuring Derrick Woodham’s virtual sculpture park (with a section devoted to this exhibition; a high-bandwidth connection is recommended) where one could mouse around a simulated landscape and see various sculptures from different angles, like one does in the real world.

Another notable telepresence was that of Glenn Davidson from Artstation in Wales, U.K., who showed how large groups of volunteers could put together huge inflatable forms by plotting their edges on large rolls of paper laid out on the floor, using a self-propelled computer-controlled device they’d cobbled together (it resembled a lawnmower, actually, but worked admirably well). Once the machine had marked the paper, the shapes were cut out by hand and assembled with tape, then inflated to become very large and somewhat complex sculptural forms.

At the heart of the conference were the live presentations by individual artists. Christian Lavigne, the founder and organizer of the event, had a lot of new work to show, using various techniques including water-jet cutting, 5-axis milling, and color printing in 3-D, which was a more impressive demonstration of this than I’d seen before. Using some new technology from Axiatec, a French company that has developed advanced methodology for using the Z-corp RP machine; he built a skull covered with images from his life and work, all of which was built and printed simultaneously. While I’d seen results from Z-corp’s color 3-D printing process before, I didn’t realize that photographic imagery was possible, nor that it could look so good. They also seem to have worked out a way to ameliorate the rough grainy surface that had been the disappointing element in Z-corp’s otherwise promising powder-bed process; the pieces Christian and Mary Visser (more about her work later) produced for this show had smooth and subtly colored surfaces, quite ready for display as finished works of art. Apparently, a VRML file provides sufficient data to drive the color 3-D printing process; I’m not sure if other formats can be used as well. I’m negotiating with Axiatec to distribute their technology in the USA; it makes a lot of things possible with RP that people have been wanting to do, but were unable to accomplish until now.

Patrick Vissenden from Montreal shared with us a fictitious phylum, creatures of an alternate reality he came up with by “Imagining Science”; building from the roots of science fiction. Having modeled a set of organic entities in wax, inspired by the fossils of the Burgess Shale and memories of Natural History displays; he scanned them in 3-D, and stars them in a series of action photos from an apocryphal microbial battlefield.

Jack Vanarsky, an Argentinean translated to France, showed us a movie composed by slicing and recombining the human face and figure; constantly reassorting its parts in a stately dance. He also produced a kinetic sculpture that reproduced the same effect; a sliced visage perturbed by a recurring motorized wavelike motion, like the shuffling of cards in the hands of an expert gambler.

Marcus Williams and his partner Sue Jowsey, both from New Zealand, looked inward to build their project, announcing it with a Maori chant and invocation. Dedicated to an intimate body-centered approach to art, they had scanned and photographed close-up details of their bodies: stubbly chin textures, hairy patches, and smooth downy expanses of flesh, mapping them to a loop of shifting organic shapes, a sculptural animation which was matched to an eerie vocal soundtrack created by modifying the recordings of Edith Piaf, the celebrated French chanteuse, to resemble an opera that may have been broadcast from Mars.

Ken Eward from Michigan based his series of works on Suiseki, the Chinese tradition of the “Scholar’s Object”, where specially selected natural objects, particularly rocks, would be mounted on polished wood bases to be contemplated like works of art. But Ken, trained as a scientist, looked to the realm of the electron microscope for his subjects, tapping particularly the aesthetic possibilities to be found in libraries of molecular models. The results may resemble bird’s nests, vertebrae or jellyfish, but they tap into a source of natural beauty unknown to most of us, and afford Ken a deep reservoir of forms that he can draw on for unexpected effects.

Mary Hale-Visser came from Texas, where she teaches art at Southwestern University, to show us the latest developments in her work, which mostly concerns the female figure, considered as a sculptural element. She deals with harlequin jugglers and dancers holding each other up, or women seemingly caught in the wheels of machinery, enmeshed in arrangements not of their making but enjoyed none the less. A particularly striking piece referenced rebirth, through a series of boxes that connect old and new bodies or thoughtforms, darkly toned in a tour-de-force use of integral RP coloration, thanks to Axiatec’s leveraging of the Z-corp process. For her, computer technology has enabled the production of ideas that would necessarily have remained dreams if this direct route from the subconscious had not been available. See some examples in various media. Along with Robert Michael Smith, Mary also organized a highly influential 2003 show on RP and sculpture that toured several U.S. venues; RMS gave a tele-lecture the first day, which I missed, but some of his work is available on the Web.

My presentation was about the evolution of my “Juxtamorphic” artwork from a manual process of making 3-D collages using molds of natural objects to a more high-tech method of accomplishing the same thing; assembling 3-D digital scans in a computer and outputting them at different scales in various materials with computer-controlled carving machines. I’ll come up with a combined audio and visual version soon, but for now, please download a Quicktime version (139 megs), or an Acrobat PDF version (65 megs) of the slides. I’ve also got the text available in English and French.

Some other artists of note represented in the exhibition, whose presentations I also didn’t catch, were Stewart Dickson and Paul Higham, both pioneers in the field. Paul has worked out methods for extracting sculptural information from vast fields of numbers; his “Datasculptures” draw on sources like the Dow Jones Average, oil-field seismic studies and MRI data to produce solid objects resembling cityscapes, rocks, and spiderwebs; his self-generating sculptures are, theoretically at least, independent of the sculptor’s hand, needing only “intelligent design” to set them in motion. See virtualsculpture.org for more about him.

Stewart Dickson also got started early at this; his interest in the “concretization” of pure mathematics and his work for the film industry coming together in the early nineties to produce solid representations of classical mathematical figures like Fermat’s, Scherk’s and Enneper’s minimal surfaces cast in bronze. In this show I was struck by his snake-like “trefoil torus knot” built with integral color texture mapping. His site has more examples of his wide-ranging output in a number of media. (I’d really like to see the 3-D zoetrope in action…)

On returning from Nancy (a beautiful little city, by the way, with many examples of Art Nouveau architecture, several fine museums and a gorgeous 18th-century plaza) I stopped in at the Parisian part of the Intersculpt show, which dealt more with the mathematical than the biological foundations of sculpture. I was already familiar with the work of some other artists with work there, like Bathsheba Grossman, Jonathan Chertok, Rinus Rollofs, Keith Brown, and Brent Collins (in collaboration with Carlo Sequin).

Bathsheba was showing some of her signature radially symmetrical topographies, built with RP machines.

Jonathan had some mysterious forms on display that suggested the negative spaces left when forms are subtracted.

Rinus was displaying small versions of works he’s realized on a much larger scale, either crystalline arrangements of Platonic solids or variations on interpenetrating toroids.

Keith had some complex organic pieces built in his seductive new style, featuring interpenetrating ovoids and softly undulating saddle shapes.

Brent and Carlo were working out the further mathematical implications of the sculpture Brent arrived at intuitively while carving in wood, which Carlo helped him to take to the next level.

Several of the sculptors represented in the show were there; I was fortunate in being able to speak with Alexandre Vitkine, who at 97–years–old qualifies as the Grand Old Man of the movement. He explained a little of his theories about simplicity, and how complex it can get when one adds a little perturbation to the formula for a simple shape. His carvings bore out his words: mostly done on a small CNC milling machine in wood, they exhibit elegance and a subtle sort of beauty I never got from Minimalist sculpture.

Some artists there were working out mathematical concepts in 3-D without using machines to do it. Phillipe Charbonneau, for instance, put together curvilinear concentric revolving forms from linear elements (evidently the working out of mathematical formulae my French wasn’t good enough to fully understand). Phillipe Rips used very basic means—tubing and cable—to construct tensegrity structures that were quite stable when erected, but could easily collapse into a small bundle. Since his English was good, I was able to get from him a first-hand account of an artist’s life in France today (not as great as I’d thought) and much insight into other topics of interest, long into the night, at a sidewalk cafe, over numerous glasses of wine…

Andrew Werby

Masterpieces of French Jewelry from American Collections

This show, at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum, traces the trajectory of jewelry-making in France from the Art Nouveau era to present times. Perhaps it’s unfair to try to analyze a country’s production from what a disparate bunch of foreigners happen to bring home with them, but either American taste went into eclipse during that period, or the exhibit charts the decline and fall of a great art tradition.

The show is arranged chronologically, and starts out well with some outstanding examples of Rene Lalique’s work in enameled gold, with other materials such as horn, ivory, opal and pearls tastefully integrated. Some large bronze sculptures, in the shape of insectile women, originally used as case decorations for his breakthrough 1900 exhibit in Paris’ Exposition Universelle, show his versatility. (Although he became famous as a jeweler, he eventually gave it up and went on to even greater success in glass, although these works, in my opinion anyway, never rose to the artistic heights achieved in his jewelry.) His genius was recognized early, with a first prize given to his multi-part Iris Bracelet in enameled gold with opal background in 1897; and the piece, included at this exhibit, still seems fresh and novel today. Among his other works shown, a figurative umbrella handle in horn and gold and a purse featuring mirrored vipers in silver and embroidered leather stand out for their strength and adventurous spirit. Other jewelry houses of the Art Nouveau period are represented as well, notably Fouquet and Boucheron. Working with similar techniques, materials and subject matter, they never rise to the same heights as Lalique, but nevertheless manage some fine pieces, like Fouquet’s Winged Chimera brooch, notable for its flowerlike settings of what appear to be American natural pearls (subject of a “pearl rush” at the turn of the century) and Boucheron’s Acacia brooch, with its finely-rendered blossoms in plique-a-jour enamel, or a Butterfly brooch, where the wings of the insect are fashioned from tabular plaques of engraved diamond. Perhaps to remind us that no movement, of itself, can be guaranteed to produce nothing but masterpieces, the show includes some undistinguished works in the Art Nouveau style, mostly “maker unknown”, generally featuring the images of young women, juxtaposed with stylistically rendered verdure, that have come to exemplify the movement in the minds of many.

Moving on to the Edwardian era, the exhibit shows how quickly the world of fashion takes up and then discards an artistic style. While enamelling is still practiced, it mostly is used to cover guilloche work (also called engine turning, used to engrave gold with mechanically accurate repetitive cuts). The nicest example shown is a tiny pencil-holder by the Husson workshop. Diamonds are a lot more prominent than before, largely due to the exploitation of the vast South African deposits found early in the century, which fueled the ultimate development of the “Garland” style, based on stylized ribbons, bows, and floral wreaths. Platinum was also introduced to the jewelry industry at about this time, and this seems to have contributed to the development of ornaments that used a minimum of metal (platinum, while it doesn’t tarnish, is quite a bit heavier than gold, let alone silver) while maximizing the use of stones, principally diamonds. The best example of the style shown here is Cartier’s Bow brooch, which relieves the monotony with panels of carved quartz crystal; an example unfortunately unheeded by subsequent designers featured here, who seem to have conceived their task principally as providing a vehicle for diamond sales.

The Art Deco movement brought some fresh air into the world of French jewelry, with its emphasis on bold geometric designs. However, I suspect it was less popular with visiting Americans than at home, since most of the examples on view here are weak and somewhat atypical. A standout piece is a vanity case by LaCloche Freres, with an arrangement of roses in carved red coral, set off by lapis leaves. A jazz band charm bracelet, maker unknown, is a truly charming piece—a row of tiny geometrically simplified musicians and their conductor are composed by arranging odd-shaped stones with a minimum of metalwork, but it has the appearance of a novelty item designed for impulse purchase, not a serious artistic effort. The best example of Deco aesthetics on view is a Panther Brooch in platinum, diamonds and black onyx (for the spots) created by Cartier for the American boxer Gene Tunney, as a present for his wife. Unfortunately, most of the more serious work has a clunky feel to it, of being constructed to make an aesthetic point rather than to be easily worn, or to complement the wearer. Perhaps this is why many of the examples from this prewar period eschew Art Deco entirely or in part and draw from historical styles, using Chinese, Egyptian, Medieval, Greek, and Mughal forms and motifs. I was struck, however, by the wide range of objects that were considered fair game for a jeweler of this period. Not just rings, brooches, earrings, necklaces and bracelets—they decorated opera glasses, produced dress clips, vanity and cigarette cases, cages for animals, purses, clocks, watches, fans and perfume bottles—it seems that a jeweler’s field of work has narrowed considerably since then.

The Postwar period seems to have marked a low point in French jewelry design, at least from an artistic perspective. Perhaps the atmosphere of scarcity or the recent trauma caused designers and their customers to retrench, but the results as seen here are lamentable. Designs were either derivative of historical patterns or suffused with the blandness that still characterizes the 1950s in our minds. In searching for more inexpensive products, colored stones were used more, but usually in standardized cuts and unimaginative designs. Perhaps copying the taste of the (American) Duchess of Windsor, a vogue was created for cute jewel-encrusted animals, but these did little to alleviate the prevailing artistic emptiness of the period. A new burst of diamonds and advertising from DeBeers, reflecting their monopoly in the world market, revived the Garland style in a simplified form, and jewelers evolved the pave technique to cover everything they made with the small round brilliant-cut diamonds that were becoming ubiquitous at the time.

The main innovation of the current era, according to this show, seems to have been the introduction of the “miracle” or invisible-setting technique. This allows stones, particularly rectangular ones, to be set edge-to-edge, without any metal showing in between. Several examples are on view, but none of them are very interesting from an creative standpoint. Yes, concentrated areas of gem color could now be created, but no—this would not be used to any great advantage, at least not here. Although technical tours de force abound, like the invisible-set ruby. sapphire, and diamond Flower Brooch created for the USA 1976 Bicentennial by Van Cleef and Arpels, no new ground was broken in artistic terms by the mainstream jewelry houses featured in this exhibition. The show does present some self-consciously avant-garde pieces designed by prominent modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Man Ray, and Andre Derain, but while striking, ultimately these are unconvincing, consisting mostly of large slabs of high-karat gold in the artist’s trademark shapes. One is left with the impression of artists otherwise committed who are willing to experiment with the jewelry medium, but only on their own terms, unwilling to adapt the mindset of a jeweler along with his materials. French artist Arman is an exception; his bracelet composed from musical instruments in gold successfully translates an essentially sculptural idiom into a workable piece of jewelry.

Striving, evidently, to end this show on a high note, the organizers rely on a single transplanted American: Joel Arthur Rosenthal (known as JAR) to convey the impression that French creativity in jewelry is not altogether dead. And in part, they succeed; his most interesting piece, a jewel-bridled circus zebra carved in variegated agate and surmounted by an elegant diamond-studded plume, recalls the heights of the Art Nouveau period, while his Blue Butterfly brooch refers back to the Deco period. The piece that hints the strongest of the artist’s own proclivities is a Daliesque Sea Urchin Clock, with its granulated gold setting for a sand-backed watch movement placed precisely in a natural urchin shell. But one is left wondering, what is being left out? Surely there are French jewelry makers commanding an original contemporary vision as well as the exacting traditional techniques preserved in Europe that enable them to express it; why aren’t they represented here? Is it that they’ve been unable to reach American customers, or that these collectors are not the high-profile types solicited by the organizers of this exhibition? For the answer, we must wait on some future sequel to this show that is more inclusive in its scope.

The Masterpieces of French Jewelry show is accompanied by a $29.95 catalog/book of the same name by Judith Price, published by Running Press of Philidelphia and London. While the pictures are nice, some are of pieces I saw in San Francisco, others are not. While many of the pieces I saw are in it, many are left out, their places filled with photos of related objects that may have been featured in a different incarnation of the show, or just shuffled in to fill things out. The rather sparse text doesn’t add much to the captions that accompanied the show, but it is annoyingly filled out as well, with fawning interviews of various peripherally-related celebrity figures like Christopher Forbes and Dina Merrill Hartley (heirs of collectors) novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford, and designer Juan Pablo Molyneux randomly interspersed.

The show runs through the 10th of June at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum. The $10 admission fee lets you into the permanent collection, featuring choice works by various European artists and a small collection of antiquities, as well as this special exhibit. While I can’t be equally positive about all the items in this show, it’s well worth the price of admission for the rare chance to see the infrequently-displayed works in the Art Nouveau section. If you can’t make it to San Francisco in time, wait until the Lalique pieces are back home at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland to see them there—this is the world’s best Lalique collection outside the Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon.

Andrew Werby