The Art of 3D Printing

way than we ever have before. Right, We're not just talking about how they could be transformative for multiple industries. We're really focusing in on this episode, right, right, we wanted to talk about three D printers and art. So this week's video is about the future of art generally. And one of the most interesting ways that the future of technology is already influencing and we'll continue to influence the future of art is digital fabrication in general and

three D printing specifically. Right, So, now we have this ability to have a machine to uh, to create three dimensional objects layer by layer, something that makes it, you know, relatively simple to build relatively complex objects. It's something where you know, with the additive manufacturing approach. We often say this is different from subtractive manufacturing, where you have to cut away or carve away material until you get what you want. Well, that's the basis for things like sculpture.

Right where you're you're taking, for at least some forms of sculpture, where you're taking some raw material and cutting away stuff until you are left with whatever the artist has envisioned within that that block. Oh stuff. And if you're taking this other approach where you're building from the ground up, where's the place? And art doesn't have a place in art. That's the fact that it's a three

D printer make mean that it shouldn't be an art. Ever, I would argue that that the three D printers and art tool and that I mean the same same way that you're still using your learned skill and talent and imagination in order to create a sculpture in the traditional way. Oh you are some sort of free thinking radical. Yeah, hold on, let me play the the angry person who wants things to be how they've always been. Okay, I

want things to be how they've always been. Jists are supposed to you know, when you make a sculpture you're supposed to hit a piece of rock with a piece of metal until you can see a face in it, and then you're supposed to wait a few thousand years until it has no arms and it's maybe it's head breaks off, or maybe people decide to remove certain parts because it no longer fits their aesthetic and they think that the naughty bits have got to go. Yeah, that

could be one thing. Yeah, that that's how it should be. I don't like the idea of using machines and computers to make art. It just seems wrong because technology has never been part of art in the past, has it. Well, Joe, that's an fairly different podcast. Let's focus specifically on three D printers, shall we. Okay, Well, come on, how can you got to sell me on this idea. How can something that's made by a machine still be a human work of art? Well, a human is still designing the artwork.

The machine didn't come up with the way that this thing looks all by itself. You still have to tell it what to print out. I mean, so it's it's just instead of instead of taking away all the parts of the block of granite that don't look like David, you're really just adding in all the parts that do look like David. Yeah. So, so, Joe, let me ask

you a question. Okay, Uh, if I were to hand you a a tight manuscript, are printed manuscript of a novel I had written, would you argue that the printer in fact was the device that wrote that piece of work? Are you asking me? Are you asking the angry guy who wants things to be how they've always been? Well, okay, yeah, even the angry guy who wants things to be how they've always been is institute e printing by now and sees that as a perfectly valid way of producing a

work of fiction. Say so. In other words, this three D printer, while it's creating a three dimensional object, it is, like you were saying, Lauren, it is a manifestation of

a design that a human has created. It still requires artistry and skill to create these virtual models that eventually get printed into three dimensions, skill which perhaps not angry Joe, but regular Joe is certainly aware of from recent times of trying to play around with a three D printer and getting it to do your well, oh yeah, it's maybe not as easy as you would guess, right, And that's just printing. You know, some some fairly basic shapes

that you have altered in tiny ways. Imagine creating an entire shape from scratch that you are just you have envisioned what this thing is going to look like once it is eventually completed, and then making sure you're working within the parameters of the three D printers abilities you know, capacity. Yeah, some three D printers don't have very high resolution, so that means you're limited in the shapes you can make, uh without having some sort of jagged edge to them. Now, granted,

you could also incorporate jagged edges into your design. That might be part of the effect you're going for. Okay, So in any case, the creativity is still coming from the person. Three D printer is just a tool. It's sort of like a chisel, except it's a very advanced chisel. It's actually kind of an anti chisel because you don't

have to cut anything away. Well exactly. Yeah. Um, so okay, maybe let's say I'm the angry guy who wants it to be how it's always been, and you've convinced me this far, I say, okay, okay, maybe it could be just as good as as a regular sculpture, you know, a chisel the old school way. Are there anyways that three D printing or that computer aided fabrication might actually allow us to do things that you couldn't do before.

I came up with this example just off the top of my head, and really the more I think about, the more I really would love to see someone implement this. I personally, I think it has been awesome. And maybe maybe it's even possible that I have seen this thing and I just don't remember it, and that therefore it feels like I've come up with an idea. But really I'm just remembering what someone else has already done. It's completely possible, it happens. I've seen a version of it.

But go ahead and explain what you were thinking, so that what I was thinking of was you take first a piece of software. You design a piece of software that can interpret sounds, and based upon those sounds create shapes. And so just imagine that any sort of hard consonant sound creates a geometric flat edge or or a corner, that kind of thing. So do you have the sort

of the ninety degree angles stuff like that. Then more vowel sounds or soft sounds create sort of curved surfaces, and then just imagine being able to speak a sentence, perhaps a fifteen second long or thirty s long amount of speech into a recorder, which actually is quite a

bit a good Shakespeare quote. Yeah, and then this this software would then interpret those sounds and create the shakes based upon what the what sounds it caught, and then send that to a three D printer, so you get a physical manifestation of what it is you said based upon the algorithms that inform the software. Right. The thing that I was thinking of was, well, a sound wave jewelry, which is a thing that made some Internet headlines within

the past say six months or so. Um, where you can record like a word or a sentence and have it printed or or etched onto a piece of jewelry, like like a ring or something like that, so you can you can say I love you and have that printed onto your wedding band. That's really cool and uh

and and also just yeah, I know, right, um. Or the kind of stuff that they're doing with some of the particle accelerator data art where they're looking at the way that things are bouncing around and they're sort of letting algorithms spin that out into these very beautiful I haven't seen it done with three D printing, but but very beautiful two dimensional uh, pieces of art, pieces of So the neat thing is that just with you can, just with a little imagination, you can create something that

would allow this sort of two dimensional manifestation become a three dimensional manifestation. Now, obviously all of that is dependent upon the artist who decides how to design that algorithm. Right the algorithms, oh sure the algorithm didn't create itself, and artists somewhere along the line has said, this is what you do. Yeah, when when X happens, do why? And then you just make sure those rules are followed properly and uh, then you get the artwork printed out.

It means that everyone would have unique pieces of art. Even if two people said the same sentence, you know that the way they say certain words is going to be interpreted in different ways from with a machine. Unless they sound identical, you're going to get to at least subtly different pieces of artwork from it. Which to me, this, this, to me is an amazing idea that I wish I could implement, but I have very little in the way

of artistic ability. Well, I love in general the idea of taking data and turning that into a new physical form of some kind. They are all kinds of ways to I guess you would say visualize, but you could also, I don't know what the word is audioize any kind you can take data and turn that into a format

that we can sense. Yeah, we talked a little bit about that in our feature of music episodes a while back, and and some of the visualization projects that people are doing with again with some of the particle accelerator data or stuff like that. Yeah, but that so this could allow you to do this in three dimensions. Um, So I want to come back to my angry guy who wants it to be how it's always been. Okay, what

else does angry guy have to say? Well, he's been convinced of a couple of things that may maybe it's it is just a legitimate tool. Three D print is maybe it can even do some things that a chisel can't do. Um, but what about the fact that after I print one copy of this sculpture I've designed on a computer, I can just press print again, make another one, and then make another one, make another one, and there's

really no priority, you know. Yeah, that's a yeah, as in, you can't say that this print out version was the original and all others are a copy, when in fact, if you think about it, the original, the quote unquote original print out is itself a physical copy, a physical copy of a digital representation. Right, so when you go to buy a painting, obviously the original one that the

painter painted is way more than a print of that. Well, and not only that, but that the virtual file, the file that the printing is based off of, is itself replicatable. You can reproduce of it. You can copy a digital file infinite number of times to distribute it. So you can't even go back to saying, oh, this one file is the original and therefore it's the thing that has value.

This is tricky, right unless you have either done something specific like and like included the reproducibility as part of the artistic expression, which is completely valid. Sure, sure create something that is in self a statement about reproducibility. Absolutely, or perhaps there's there may be cases where the artist ends up creating a virtual model, sends it to print. Once it's done printing, the artist might destroy that original

file and then you really do have one copy, one original. Yeah. Oh, that's a scary, scary thing to contemplate doing. I think it would all depend upon the artist and what the artist wanted to say clearly, but I I would want to say to angry Joe here that reproducibility is and always has been a huge part of and an issue

in art. I mean, way before three D printing ever existed, Okay, I mean, like for for ages, when students are first learning how to art, that they sometimes copy or more modern le trace work from established artists, and and technology for creating replicas of art go back way to ancient times like coin stamps, yeah, or or molds for pottery

or bronze, uh millennium or so. After that, we started creating wood cuttings that allowed for creating multiple prints of single images, and and later um etched or engraved metal surfaces to improve the resolution of that kind of printing technology. And then you know lithography or photography, which we're both developed.

Her photography developed yeah, not only made the pun but in the notes yeah her uh yeah, no sorry, those those are both developed in the late seventeen and or early eighteen hundreds and uh and then motion fell motion photography in the late eighteen hundreds, and each of these technologies as they were created, brought the possibility for for remote viewers to at least in some part experience seeing works of art that they might otherwise never have access to.

Um and and also opened up new avenues for artists to make money, which I think we can all agree on as being a pretty rad thing. Um but unfortunately also did open the door to to forgeries, which kind of suck and uh and according to some theory, also diluted the cultural value of viewing a k A participating

in an original work of art like Angry Joe. Is kind of implying, by the way, if this, if this is a topic that is of some kind of interest to you, this theoretical debate, I do highly recommend an essay called the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which was written in nineteen thirty six. I told you people have been worried about this for a while by a German theorist by the name of Walter Benjamin.

Um was was during that dawn of what we know as the mass media today, and a lot of people in the arts were kind of freaking out about it, this concept of being able to reproduce through photography or film, the experience of seeing something, and he argued that reproductions completely removed the the aura or the authenticity of an original work of art, furthermore, turn viewers from participants in art into passive consumers, and furthermore, allows kind of negative

stuff like politics or war to be aestheticized in place of art. Um And Okay, so so that's all a little bit dire and also perhaps off topic from what

we are talking about. But but I really wanted to just demonstrate that this has all been worried about before, all right, And and even though these kind of technological advances did change the way that we interact with art and perhaps even the way that we participate in art, it did not in fact result in, OMG, the end of all art as we know it, right right, right. I I don't think the real me agrees with angry

means objection about the reproducibility. I don't necessarily see reproducibility as a big stumbling block, maybe because I don't necessarily believe in the aura of an original piece of art. Oh, it's it's it's an interesting theory, and I do think that the experience of going and seeing um a Picasso or the Mona Lisa, or a pyramid is a different experience than seeing a copy of any of those things

are seeing it on a photograph or in film. But like like viewing viewing an original painting as opposed to viewing a print or viewing someone else's copy of that original painting, even if it looks like it is faithfully reproduced it you can you know there is something interesting about that. If you were to ask someone, especially if they knowingly are viewing a copy, you know, how does this make you feel as opposed to knowing that the original of this is in some other museum far away?

You know, there's something psychological there. It doesn't necessarily have to be imbued in the object itself, but there is

something inside us that makes that different. Yeah. Yeah, I think it does have to do with I mean, I'm not saying we literally believe in magic, but there is some kind of idea of contiguous magic that you know, it's like oh, this, uh, you know, piece of paper was really signed by your favorite celebrities, This was touched by that person, this was interacted some of their atoms

are on that piece of paper. I mean, like, for example, just recently this this is also kind of a tangent, but just recently I went to Ireland and saw the Book of Kells, one of the one of the oldest illuminated manuscripts in Europe and uh, particularly I mean in Ireland, and and it brought tears to my eyes to see this thing. I gonna keep in mind, I was also a medievalist in college, so it was very much near

and dear to my heart. And I've seen countless replicas of this and and you know, representations of the artwork that's in that book, but it didn't have that emotional impact that seeing the real thing did. Oh sure, But I would not say that the fact that those reproductions can be produced period uh is taking anything away from the original. Absolutely, I agree with that, absolutely, I think

that uh. And in the sense of a three D printed piece of artwork, I don't even know that if I even if I knew, hey, the artist could just hit print and make another one of these, I don't necessarily think that would take away my admiration for the skill it took and the artistry it took to design it. In the first place. Okay, But so all of this theoretical discussion aside, three D printing art is a real thing. Um, that is really happening. So let's talk about how that works.

I would imagine, I have not done this myself, that you can use a three D scanner in order to make, for example, a reproduction of an artwork. Okay, so now you're not just a free thinking radical, You're a freethinking radical who wants to make forgeries of actual art. I got you pinned here, Lauren. I see where this is going. But now you're correct. You can use three D scanners to to replicate things like like existing pieces of artwork,

and not just replicate right to create your own. I mean, you know, if you were three D scanning UM and arm in order to incorporate that into some kind of very weird Clive Barker kind of kind of like, let's say that you wanted to produce a replica in some form of Venus de Milo, but in a place of normal human arms, which would have been there but have since I've been lost to us terminator arms or I was gonna say tentacles, but sure terminating clause. Oh crab clause.

Oh yeah, Oh that'd be so great. You can totally do that. I would love it. Okay, at home, you might be thinking, what what what I've heard about three D printing? What's deal with three D scanning? Well, three D scanners are out there. There a technology that's uh the sort of the counterpart to a three D printer, the inverse, if you will. So a three D printer takes a digital shape and it makes it physical. A three D scanner samples of physical shape and makes it digital.

So it's sort of like a camera, except what a camera does is gets a two D picture. A three D scanner uses a variety of different ways to get a three D picture. Now, what are the different ways that a three D scanner could sample a physical object? My favorite, of course has to be leasers. So, uh yeah, laser You use the laser line passing it over an object. This laser line has a sort of a laser and a camera sensor together, and the camera sensor what it's

doing is it's recording three D points in space. Essentially, any point where the laser makes contact with a physical object that becomes a reference point for the virtual object that will be produced in a computer model. So these lasers are placed around the outside of the object and

scan in moor d on. Yeah, and you might have a device that allows you to to just lower a physical array of lasers that scan the whole thing at once, or you might have to rotate the object, or rotate the laser around the object and get several scans in order to get a full picture, a three dimensional picture of this object. There are a lot of different implementations of this laser line, patch and spherical are all examples of methods to use lasers to to scan a physical object.

But basically you're doing the same thing over and over again. You're creating these these floating three D points in space that represent the surface of whatever the object is. Tends to be a pretty quick way to make a scan. It's also really good for stuff that's free form and flowy, kind of organic, you know. The more rounded shapes of three D scanning is great for that kind of stuff. So there's another one that you're probably not going to

see popping up in the art world much. This is going to be more in industrial use, but it's worth mentioning because it is a way of three D scanning which would be CT scanning, which uses X rays. Yeah, this is what you would often get in a medical setting, like if you go in for computerized tomography, that's what it stands for. UM. You will go into a room and they will penetrate your soft, fleshy outer layers with X rays, which they don't penetrate the hard tissue, so

things like bone tissue they're not going to penetrate. So you know, you've probably seen you may have actually had a CT scan or you've probably seen at least a depiction of one. UH. These are the ones that have like the doughnut, the rounded UH chamber that can move either move over a patient or the patient is actually on a platform that moves through this. The point being here that they use X rays, which you don't want

to be exposed to for very long. Now for patients, the X ray does you get in a typical scan is pretty low, so the risk of any adverse health

effects is also very low. Oh, sure, they have the operators stand in other rooms because the sheer number of these things that they would be exposed to over the course of a day or a week or a lifetime in the field would in fact be dangerous yes, so you would you know, if you were wanting to use CT scanning for three D scanning purposes, it would obviously be something that you would need the right facility to

use that without putting yourself at a risk. Right, So this might be more often in an industrial setting, say to like analyze the structural performance of a part or a prototype or something like that. It's probably not something you're going to use in your house to scan your kid and then make your little action figure of your kid for your kid. Right now, Joe, I understand that there's possibly a way of scanning something in three dimensions using just kind of a simple camera approach. Not just

possibly there there are ways your mouth. Yeah, optical scanning, uh all, I guess lasers would probably also be optical. Show, but this would be standard optical scanning with a camera camera based scanning for real. Yes, uh I My guess is that this is fairly buggy, but I've never used it myself, so maybe it would surprise me, but it

is real. You can use a camera on your phone in combination with the specialized app, Like there's one app called one to three D Catch, and what you do is you take photographs from many angles around the object in question, and so you like go in a circle around and take photographs from all the different angles. The app analyzes the photos and then creates a three D model.

In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MET, actually encourages you to use this method to make digital copies of their holdings and modify them with your own three D printing projects. So, in other words, kind of like how a a DJ might remix various pieces of music to create something new, you could remake x actual existing pieces of art. Yeah. Well, I guess the one exception would be in the exhibits that are specifically labeled like

no photography. But I read I read a little statement from somebody at the MET saying like, oh yeah, this is great wherever it's permitted in the museum. Scan them up and go go home, print them out, do what you want, and so crab clause clause's And it actually really cool. Also is that the Met put a bunch of their pre rendered scans of these exhibits up on the thingy Verse. It's a site that hosts downloadable three D designs that you can get yourself. You just go up,

download them, send them to your three D printer. Yeah, this is, by the way, not that different from the way the connect scans things. I'll talk about a connect hack a little bit later, but there are three D scanners that specifically use infra red light and cameras in

order to make a three dimensional scan. Same basic ideas what we're talking about here, except instead of using the visible light that you know you're typical camera relies upon, it's using infrared light, which is not visible to we puny mortal humans, but some other animals can see it pretty well. Anyway, It's the same basic premise as what is being talked about here, It is just using a different type of light, a different wavelength. How about digitizing,

So this is cool. So we've talked about using light and lasers and and X rays. All of these are electromagnetic means of looking at an object and and getting a three dimensional model virtual model. Digitizing is using contact. You're actually using something that's that's making contact with the physical object itself and running a probe over this object in order to get very precise readings of what that object, how it shaped, so that you can create an incredibly

precise three dimensional model of it. Now, this tends to be really good for geometric shapes that have a lot of flat surfaces, hard angles, that kind of thing. It's less good for stuff that happens to have organic free form shapes. I imagine that would be just the onus of the probe operator to yeah, to being able to to fallow around contours. It's it's it's harder to do.

You know, a flat surface is easier to define with a digitizer than something that is lumpy or has these these curves surfaces to it, So, uh, you probably would want to use lasers or some other methodology for that.

But for anything that has got you know, flat surfaces geometric shapes, this is a really really precise means, and depending upon what kind of of object you're scanning and what purpose you're scanning it for, you may actually use a combination of these approaches to build your virtual model. So you may do a pass with a digitizer as well as passes with lasers in order to create as as uh as faithful virtual replica as you possibly can

for whatever thing you're trying to to replicate. Um. So, there are actually a lot of these scanners out there on the market today, but a lot of them are very expensive. Well, how expensive is very expensive? Well? I found a list online of of a lot of the models that are sold. Good number of them were more than twenty dollars. That's a little dear, it's a little outside of my price range. Certainly for the hobbyist artist. That's ah. But there are cheaper ones out there. Um in,

I believe like maker bot is working on one. They've they've got the maker Bot digitizers. Then of course there are hacks you can do to turn objects like the Xbox three sixty connect this into a scanner. This is really cool, tell us about this. So yeah, like I was saying that the connect it relies upon infrared sensors and cameras. Right, So you've got an emitter that shoots

out infrared and in for a grid. Think of it like think of an overlay that is just a grid of infrared light and any physical object that encounters that deforms that grid. And so by by measuring that deformation, the connect can determine what sort of object is standing there and when it's moving. This is what allows you to have that kind of movement based gameplay, and in

fact in three dimensions, right, exactly. So, I mean it's just like if you were to make a grid of strings and you then move that grid of strings against a physical object, that would deform that grid, and you could see how that was deformed, and that would define the three dimensional object there, right, same sort of things that we're just talking about. Light, uh, and it's light

that you cannot see. Um So anyway, imagine that you have this little grid and then you think, well, what if I just created some software that could leverage this in a different way, not just for a way of of recognizing a user or being able to interpret users movement as commands for a game, but to actually scan

the user or any other physical object. Well that there are a lot of people who have done this, including a kid who uploaded his approach on instructibles and he just used stuff that was already out there and kind of created a guide of how you could do this yourself.

And it was great because I watched this video this kid made, and I mean the kid had to be, uh, you know, pretty young, maybe thirteen fourteen years old something along those lines, and he walks through step by step explaining exactly what you need to do, how you can set up your connect um. Again, this is a three

sixty connect. The Xbox one connect is more locked down, it is less hacker friendly, but the three sixty one had a lot of use that people have have leveraged for various things, everything from digital puppetry to three D scanners. And he demonstrate exactly how to do this, what drivers you needed to download, how to connect to your connect to a PC so that you can upload the right software, and how you could then use it to capture three

dimensional images. He even used himself as a model, sat down, did two full rotations to try and get as accurate a model as possible, and then even said, these these patchy parts we can fix in editing. So even after you are done, even if it's not a perfect three dimensional model, you can fix that in editing software. So it's really cool. It was, and it was again one of those things that anyone could follow, and the kid made it very understandable, very easy for you to to

do yourself. If you have a three connect at home, but if you wanted something a little bit little more off the shelf, less d I Y, there's an option for that too. Write There are plenty of them. The one that I have in our notes specifically is three D systems since scanner s E N S E scanner and this one is another infrared scanner, so it's using the same basic technology as a connect but this case it's meant as a three dimensional scanner specifically, and it's

a little handheld unit. It kind of looks like something that you would see off Star Trek, you know, like you would want to scan the environment, some kind of little wand sort of thing. Almost. Yeah, I'm sure I could find this out if I looked it up, but I don't even know how that would work. If it's handheld. I would think that the scanner would need to be stationary,

not at all. That's the That's the interesting thing is that you can actually have this handheld scanner and you you wave it across whatever physical object you're trying to scan, and the software itself can interpret those three dimensional points and build that model. And this would even allow you to scan fairly large objects like a motorcycle, and it

wouldn't even have to be something on a small scale. Um, it does help if the object you're scanning is very very very still, so scanning a person would be a little more problematic. Than say scanning a table or a chair or a motorcycle. But it is pretty nifty, not cost about three and um, it's something that is proprietary to the Cuba Fi three D printer. It's it's meant

to work with one of those. So that means that you're kind of locked down into what equipment you can use to to make this useful for three D printing purposes. But it's still pretty cool. Yeah, Okay, So let's try to imagine this whole process. Uh so you want to get a Venus de Milo with a Jonathan Strickland head and crab claw arms. Who wouldn't who wouldn't want that in their living room? Or you know? Four? What what does the whole process look like? So I guess you

take your handheld scanner to the museum. Where where is the Venus Demilo right now? Right now? I don't know. She could be anywhere. Yes, she she could be lurking around the corner. You're gonna look that up for us, Joe, hold on, Yeah, I'm gonna find out. Okay, it looks like it's the love Okay, Okay, that's good, assuming that

she's not actually a weeping angel. Right. So assuming one that she's not a weeping angel, and that two you are allowed to carry said handheld three three dimensional scanner into the louver and then into her wing and exactly. But let's let's assume you've got the full clearance to do this. So you would go to the Venus de milo Uh sculpture and you would scan it thoroughly so that you've got a nice virtual model of it. Right. Then you would also need a three dimensional model of

you know, my head. Yeah, so we'd scan your head, and we we'd scan some crab clause. Right. If you didn't want to create the virtual model of crab clause yourself, then you would scan some crab clause, delicious crab clause. You would pull all of these together in some form of computer aided design program, right, so you'd hook it up to your computer. And we've talked about CAD programs before, but basically they're they're sort of for the three D

world what Photoshop is to the two D world. They let you manipulate three D objects in a in a digital space, and you can do all kinds of reshaping and right neat little tricks. You would need to obviously scale all three elements properly so that you could fit them together for your three dimensional model, right, because if you had tiny little crab claws on the Venus de Milo that would be ludicrous, or or a ginormous Jonathan head that would be disturbing. It's improperly scaled, that would

be horrible. You don't you don't want to have a super deformed Jonathan head Venus de Milo crab claw armed creations. So we get done with the final thing. We we've combined them all into one file, and then basically you're about done. You just well, you might need to go through one more step, which is, uh, what's going to have to happen with some three D printers is you're translating this object file like a dot O b J

or a dot STL. This is the object file you edit into a file that is a direct set of instructions for your printer, perhaps a proprietary one I would imagine some of the printers deal with I think. So it would really depend upon what scanner you were using,

what what computers. Yeah, so there are some suites where you're going to be using a specific scanner, which in turn is going to determine what software you use, which in which also works with a specific type of printer, and if everything is working within that same ecosystem, it's relatively simple to go from scan to virtual model to print.

Some others might mean that you have to do some conversion along the way, either from whatever file your scanner is creating or whatever file your virtual software is creating to whatever files your printer will accept. Then there may be more work on your end depending upon that, But that's it. There you go after after four or five

adhesion failures. Of course, assuming that all goes as it should. Yeah, then you have your beautiful designed, your your venus district lond with crab claws, and the art world has forever changed. I mean, you have revolutionized a generation. You might be staring at this creation thinking what hath I wrought? And you may have a kind of a metaphysical um you know, dilemma on your hands about do I allow any other human to lay eyes upon this and risk them to

lose sanity in the great Cathulu Mythos version. But but in a fun way, you know, in a in a gay culture way. Yeah, it might be one of those ways where you you have that and you think well, this needs to be shared to the rest of the world so that we can all wallow old rich horror that we have produced. Yeah. Yeah, but so I wanna I want to I want to bring this discussion back for completely non nefarious purposes to forgeries. Oh boy, So

we talked about reproducibility, and now we've introduced scanning. I wonder what you could do with the idea of of scanning of works of art and endless reproducibility. Okay, I have not heard any news stories of forgery artists creating and selling three D scanned and printed copies on the illegal black market, right well, with some things that might be really hard to do because with like say a large marble sculpture or something like that, your three D

printer can't make that right now, nothing yet. I don't know, is there a marble printer out there? It would be really, really, really hard to do. Yeah. Um, but but similar technology for some types of art does exist already on a commercial front, So probably it's really only a matter of time before we've got some kind of update to the Thomas Crown affair that involves right there, there's they're multiple incarnations of the Thomas Kroniffair. You don't have to necessarily

grab one. I'm thinking of that horrible pierced Braska. Please proceed. Alright, So already on the market for the discerning but not a billionaire art collector. Fuci Film has created a process that will let you own a copy of a Van Go that's like accurate down to the original frame, the three dimensional brush strokes, the paint textures, and the scrawled notes on the back of the canvas. They're they're calling this process really biography. And each reproduction created with this

process costs thirty four thousand dollars or so um. But that's still cheaper than you know, Van Go so grand. I mean, that's that's like nothing, that's nothing in the in the world of an original, verified Van Go. How much does a van cost? I'm going to how much does go for? Oh? No, com Now we're talking millions of dollars for an original van Go. Now let me

ask you this, Lauren. If I were to buy such a reproduction, would it be convincing enough for me to to go around claiming, oh, this is the original Van Go? It would not. It would not fool an expert. It would probably fool your friends. Well, my friends are dumb. Okay, so that's not saying a lot. Well, I mean they have to be friends with me. You gotta have you

gotta aim low. Well, that is pretty cool, the idea that you can use these techniques not just to reproduce the two dimensional aspect of painting, but literally the brushstrokes the texture of it right right. Um. The Vango Museum in Amsterdam has been helping to fund the project and therefore has a three year contract out on the technology with Fujifilm. But but after that it will hypothetically open up to other museums or possibly the public, I mean

the you know, the really well funded public. The fact that the van Go Museum is partnering with this should tell you a it's not a legitimate uh threat for like a truly convincing not legitimately illegitimate. Well, I mean it's not a threat. How about you put that way? Otherwise it's not a threat. They don't consider it. They're not worried about this becoming such a thing that I mean partially because it is such a process that they

really have to work very directly. I mean, if you were going to break into a museum and three ds. It's not as simple as just waving a wand over. Yeah, now, it is pretty amazing how how incredibly accurate a very thorough laser scan can be. But then when you think about it, it's light, you know, it's light. Light is made up of these tiny little particles, tiny little wavelengths,

and uh, and it can happen really really fast. I'm always amazed this kind of a tangent, but I'm always amazed at how quickly light can ascertain something like a a scan of a barcode, for example. How it happens so quickly, and you think, wow, that lea's fast than you're thinking, Oh wait, I'm working with light speed of light, so it really shouldn't surprise me that it goes quickly.

A lot of these classic works are also behind cases or I mean it's it would be you would have to might be large early people who are to remove you forcibly. Yeah, lots of security systems, um. But the FUJIFILM isn't even the only people who are working on this. A group within Cannon has also been collaborating with Dutch researcher Tim Zaman to do essentially the same thing. So some artists and designers are creating restorations and fa similies of even older works using three D printing plus a

few other techniques to kind of stitch everything together. There's this one design company called Factum art or art or I don't know Italian. I think, I think, I think it would be okay, excellent Um that's working on a life size copy of of King Tut's tomb with the hope of eventually taking tourist pressure off of the original. That's also, yeah, because with things like archaeological sites, oh yeah, every time you walk through it, you're ruining little bits

of it. So I would I would absolutely love to go through a a faithful reproduction of reproduction, something that's like a faithful reproduction of any historical site where I can feel like I can move through it and have the experience of what it would have been like to go through that space, and also know that I am not simultaneously destroying it. Yeah, destroying it even on just

a minute level. Because I think about walking through Shakespeare's House at Strafford upon Avon and and and loving that experience, but then thinking, yeah, just the fact that I'm here means that this building has suffered a little ware and tear. Now, granted, pretty much every part of that building has been replaced at some point or another, but that's a totally different philosophical discussion, which we've talked about in another podcast, or at least we've alluded to, so we won't go into

that here. So, so that kind of thing is becoming a physical possibility. And furthermore, that same group is working with Sir john Son's Museum in London to fabricate pieces based on an eighteenth century artist's etchings of ancient Roman artifacts. These things only exist at the current moment in two dimensional etchings, and they're creating actual sculptures based on what this dude was drawing. Okay, so it's is a three dimensional representation of a two dimensional representation of a three

dimensional object. That that's pretty awesome, And like, at that point, is it? Is it a forgery? Is an entirely new art? Like what are they even doing? It's a copy of a copy of an original of a that's yeah, I mean, that's that's an interesting it's a brand new question. It's brand new category exciting stuff that wouldn't have been possible without this kind of level of technology. Okay, so my angry art fan who wants things to be how they've

always been. He's very convinced at this point, except he has one last reservation. Okay, he's like, does anybody else in the art world take digitally fabricated artwork? Seriously? I mean, is there any place in the world where this has actually been shown in a museum or short answer, yes, yeah, there are actually quite a few museums I have shown some three D printed stuff or have incorporated three D printing directly into installations. Let us talk about some of those,

shall we? All right, how about this exhibit out of hand? The sounds interesting? Yeah, The MAD the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, and it was an exhibit featuring not just three D printed objects, but generally digital fabrication, and three D printing was one of the aspects of that. Right. They also included a lecture series about the various methods that art as used so that people could learn more

about digital fabrication. But a lot of their artworks are really cool, and I mean I legitimately I look at that and say I want to see that just as much as I want to see traditional artworks. Oh sure, and it was some terrific functional pieces as well, right, like they had like furniture or they even had flatwear

likewere like strange kling on silverware. Yeah, it kind of made me think of something that you had see in a science fiction film where you know, you're the the human is sat down at the dinner table along all the aliens and it's like, I don't know if that's

a salad fork or an eviscerating knife. I kind of kind of thing yea, or or or press thess to which um which I think that we talked a little bit about way when we first started the show, the beautiful things that artists are doing to create wonderful original pross theses for customers. Yeah, so it doesn't really make all that much sense for us to just try to describe how they look on here. But you should go look this up. It's the exhibit is called out of

Hand at the Mad Museum website. You should look it up. They've got pictures of a lot of their things from this exhibit. It's really cool. You'll try to remember to to blog about it or post on so Shellson of the links to this staff and there are other examples that have been featured in some some museums of note. Right. Yeah, one example I found was called Fractal Dot mg X and this was at the MET. We talked about the

matter earlier, um, but it was it was designed. It was a three D printed object based on fractal patterns, which are fractals are are representations of mathematical sets. And uh, this was a table that married the art and beauty of fractals with the practicality of furniture. So you had to you know, you couldn't just make a bunch of three D printed fractals without making some sort of of aesthetic changes so that you can make it a functional

piece of furniture. Is not currently on display at the MET, but it is in their collection. Uh. And they've also have hosted three D hackathons, which they allow visiting artists to come in and create digital fabrication exhibits and and also to to just communicate with the public about what it is they do and how it's done. Um. I've seen some great pictures of people just being able to walk through into an enormous room just filled with three

D printers. So imagine that that lovely little smell we get whenever we print a thing here in the office, just filling an entire room because there's thirty of these things that's going to be the good stuff right there. Uh. And then there's also I mean, it's not really like an official museum or anything, but there are a lot of festivals like maker Fair, uh that have lots of folks using three D printers in creative and artistic ways.

And you know maker Fair, you think of it, it's it's usually I think of it as a sense of of hackers who have built interesting stuff that does something really cool. But in a lot of cases it is really a work of art. It's not meant to necessarily be something that's practical, or in some cases it's both practical and art. You don't have to be one or

the other. Oh sure. And I think that there's a perception within the community or within the greater Western culture that that kind of stuff is a craft rather than an art, and certainly not a fine art. But I think that one of the beautiful things about all of this technology and bringing all of this technology into the kind of normal consumer level of price range, is that it allows any normal person who has the drive to do so, to create art and and that's and share

it with people. Furthermore, I mean, imagine people who have these amazing visions of art, but not necessarily the capability of bringing it into reality through the traditional means that it opens up a world that we would never be able to experience because we would never be able to see that person's vision writer, or the access to the kind of education that some of the great masters would

have had, or you know. Yeah, So, I mean it's really we're really excited about three D printers in their place and art and uh, don't don't be the grumpy old man. Uh that Joe was portray angry Joe was the angry Joe was. Yeah, be the be, the be

the very mellow accepting man that Joe is. Now. In another podcast coming up this week, we're also going to talk about another aspect of the angry old man and art, who more generally just thinks that art should be low tex So if you're interested in that topic, check us out again. Yeah, well, we'll definitely be chatting about that and having a lot of angry old man type of arguments. I might even throw in my own version of the

angry old Joe, which is really just Jonathan. Yeahs. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, maybe there's something that you've always wondered about about you know, what is this going to be like in the future, and you want to hear our take on it, or you just maybe you want us to to really dive into some specific topic. Let us know, send us a message on Facebook or Twitter, or Google Plus or handle

at all three is f w thinking. We look forward to hearing from you and will pop to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,