the sound of Saturday morning

as an artist, academic, and serving on the board of directors of my local hackerspace, it can feel like I often don’t have enough studio time for my creative work. in the last 5 months, I’ve been especially busy with teaching + related activities, however, looking ahead I anticipated that my art-making schedule would be quite limited during this time.  I like to give my creative making a lot of space to really suss out new ideas and let the work lead my thinking to interesting places, but I knew it’d be counter-productive if I forced myself to make a lot of “new work” (hint: it’d probably be some tired rehashing of ideas I already had.  ::yawn::)

so, rather than lament the fact that I couldn’t be in the studio every waking hour, I came around to the fact that this was kind of an opportunity to get into my creative research on 3D printing – more specifically, finding ways for 3D printing to become more accessible to artists + art students.  it helped that coincidentally right around the same time, one of the members of my hackerspace, red, started a 3D printer build group. now I’m a bit pleased to say that I’ve reached one goal of the whole project – build a printer that produces consistent and “acceptable quality” objects (I could spend a lot more money and time tweaking my current printer to get print results down to the micron-level tolerance, but let’s push things forward…). now there are a few more steps I’d like to have done before I’d like to present the whole project somehow, but I think this is a pretty solid “middle-of-the-project” place to be at the moment.  so just take a minute to watch some object being printed in my studio if you’d like.

now I never intended to set out making new pieces – however, I’ve also found that making this creative tool jump-started a lot of new ideas for my artwork – ideas that would’ve never come about if I would’ve muddled around in the same studio-mind I inhabited after putting up my show last September.  in other words, this creative research was actually beneficial to the studio practice in the long run – a bit of an investment really. now that I can actually make fairly decent print, I can follow some of these ideas – so, +1 for the artwork too.

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in the video, I’m making bracket for a spool of plastic filament (the material the printer extrudes.)  I combined these two designs:
Filament Spool by Cubic Print
Filament Holder