CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium – 14th May 2018

CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium

Date: Monday 14 May 2018

Time: 1-5pm

Venue: Keynes Library, School of Arts Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

Free to attend, but registration is required. Book here

All welcome

This half-day interdisciplinary symposium will explore how digital 3D technologies are transforming the ways that art and cultural artefacts are produced, stored and shared.

3D printing has been used to reconstruct destroyed ancient monuments, inspire activist communities and help reimagine contemporary art practice. As digital 3D technology finds new applications in an ever-growing number of fields, it has opened up new possibilities for digital reproduction on a global scale, seeming to promise new alternatives to mass-manufacture and unprecedented opportunities for the circulation and exchange of objects.

The increasing role of digital 3D technology in the production and reception of art and cultural heritage raises numerous urgent aesthetic and ethical questions. Although many of these concerns – such as big tech monopolies, uneven accessibility and energy consumption – are shared with other areas of digital culture, their particular manifestations in relation to 3D printing technologies frequently animate these issues in ways that emphasise the interconnection between the digital and the material. As such, critical explorations of digital 3D technology can help to challenge out-dated distinctions between virtual processes and material objects and infrastructures, revealing some of the ways in which our world is being radically, but often silently, reshaped by the power structures that underpin digital technology.

This interdisciplinary symposium brings together artists, curators, conservators and researchers working in art history, law, media studies to explore the significance of 3D printing and associated digital 3D technologies for artistic and cultural practice.

Event schedule

13:00     Welcome: Elizabeth Johnson (Birkbeck)

13:15     Amelia Knowlson (Sheffield Hallam University) will present new research on the curatorial decision-making processes behind 3D digitisation at The British Museum. Her work used design-based methods to examine micro pre-existing and emerging 3D projects across curatorial departments.

13:45     Xavier Aure (University of West England) will discuss the influence of computer graphics techniques in his research on visualisation and texture reproduction of paintings.

14:15     Dukki Hong (Bournemouth University) will introduce some IP issues in relation to emerging 3D printing technologies, considering what IP law is; how it is constructed; and most importantly why 3D printing matters to IP law.

14:45     Break

15:15     Mara-Johanna Kolmel (Leuphana University Lüneburg,) will be speaking about Reforming the Formless. An art historical perspective on 3D technologies.

15:45     Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths) will discuss The 3D Additivist Cookbook, a compendium of 3D .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times, which he devised and edited in collaboration with artist Morehshin Allahyari.

16.15     Discussion chaired by Joel McKim, (Birkbeck)

If you have any additional access requirements please get in touch elizabeth.johnson@bbk.ac.uk

This event is kindly supported by the Lorraine Lim Postgraduate Fund and the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

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BIMI/Vasari Digital Animation Series: Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams – Friday 2 February 2018 6.30pm

Vasari Digital Animation Series: Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams
Friday 2 February 6:30 – 9:00
In collaboration with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

Artists Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams both use animation to explore the relationship between digital and biological forms. Holder’s work considers the structures and hierarchies of the technological and natural worlds, and how these systems are constantly abstracted. Powell-Williams’ practice merges sculptural installations, performance and GIFs, using them to address the construction of identity through objects and memory.
Following screenings of work by both artists, Holder and Powell-Williams will discuss hybrids, molluscs, fantasy and the interplay between the digital and the corporeal in their work.

Joey Holder is a London based artist who received her BA from Kingston University (2001) and her MFA from Goldsmiths (2010). Her artistic practice and research spans video and multimedia installations both online and offline. Her work raises philosophical questions of our universe and things yet unknown, regarding the future of science, medicine, biology and human-machine interactions. Working with scientific and technical experts she makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. Connecting forms which have emerged through our human taste, culture and industrial processes she investigates complex systems that dissolve notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. GM products, virtual biology and aquatic creatures are incorporated into an extended web; challenging our perception of evolution, adaptation and change. By contrasting so-called ‘organic’ and ‘man-made’ substances and surfaces through a series of abstractions, she creates a world of manifold layers, none more unified or natural than the next. These hybridities may suggest a particular function or natural form but remain elusive through their odd displacement.

Recent

solo/duo exhibitions include ‘SELACHIMORPHA’, Photographers Gallery, London (2017), ‘Ophiux’, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2016), ‘TETRAGRAMMATON’, LD50, London (duo w/ John Russell) (2016), ‘Lament of Ur’, Karst, Plymouth (duo w/ Viktor Timofeev) (2015);

‘BioStat.’, Project Native Informant, London (2015) and ‘HYDROZOAN’, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include ‘HYDROZOAN’ at the 7th Moscow International Biennale Of Contemporary Art, Russia (2017), ‘WALLPAPERS’ at New Forms

Festival, Canada (2017), ‘Designing Desire’ at FACT, Liverpool, UK (2017), ‘Alien Matter’, Transmediale, Berlin (2017), The Noise of Being, Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2017), ‘Winter is Coming’, Georg Kargl, Vienna (2016), ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Wysing Arts Centre,

Cambridge (2015); BODY HOLES, New Scenario, online exhibition at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2016), ‘Sunscreen’, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); ‘A Plague of Diagrams’, ICA, London, UK (2015), ‘#WEC- Whole Earth Catalyst’, The Composing

Rooms, Berlin, Germany (2015); ‘h y p e r s a l o n’, Art Basel Miami, USA (2014); ‘Vestige: The Future is Here’, Design Museum, London (2013) and ‘Multinatural Histories’, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013).

http://www.joeyholder.com/index.php/2017/porphyrin/

Candida Powell-Williams lives and works in London. She graduated from the RCA, London in 2011. Selected exhibitions include: ‘Boredom and its Acid Touch’, Frieze Live (2017); ‘Tongue Town’, Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; ‘Cache’, Art Night, London (2017); and ‘Coade’s Elixir’, Hayward Gallery, London (2014). In 2013 Powell-Williams was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship at BSR, Rome. She is currently artist in residence the Warburg Institute London.

https://www.candidapowell-williams.com

Elizabeth Johnson is an Associate Research Fellow in the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology, Birkbeck

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Digital Aesthetics Reading Group – 21 March 2017 3pm

symbolic-misery

The next meeting of the Vasari Research Centre hosted Digital Aesthetics Reading Group will take place on the 21st of March from 3pm to 5pm in the Vasari Centre, 43 Gordon Square.

For this meeting we will be reading the work of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The readings, a short essay entitled “Suffocated Desire, Or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual” and two excerpts from Stiegler’s book Symbolic Misery, are available as pdfs upon request. I hope some of you will be able to join us on the 21st.

All best wishes,

Joel

Dr. Joel McKim

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Digital Aesthetics Reading Group: 9 December 2016 3pm

The next meeting of the Vasari Research Centre hosted Digital Aesthetics Reading Group will take place on 9 December from 3pm to 5pm in the Vasari.

For this meeting we will be reading two essays from the recent Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design collection (edited by David Berry and Michael Dieter).

The two essays – “Aesthetics of the Banal: ‘New Aesthetics’ in an Era of Diverted Digital Revolutions” by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold and “The Genius and the Algorithm: Reflections on the New Aesthetic as a Computer’s Vision” by Stamatia Portanova – are available upon request and all are very welcome to join us.

All best wishes,

Joel McKim

j.mckim@bbk.ac.uk

 

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Digital Aesthetics Reading Group 29 June 2016

Dear all,

The second meeting of the Vasari Research Centre hosted Digital Aesthetics Reading Group will take place on 29 June from 4pm to 6pm in the Vasari Centre.

Our topic this meeting will be a broad examination of the theories and methodologies of the Digital Humanities with a focus on literary critic Franco Moretti (a proponent of quantitative measurement within the humanities) and some of the current debates surrounding the field. PDF texts by Moretti and Maciej Eder are available upon request and we will also draw from the following online resources.

Review of Moretti’s Distant Reading: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/1/000171/000171.html

LARB Critique of Digital Humanities: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/

Response to LARB Critique: https://thepointmag.com/2016/criticism/system-reboot

Hope you can join us.

All the best,
Joel

Dr Joel McKim

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