Internationally Known Artist Partners with Award-Winning Startup for Crowdsourced Sculpture

PrintToPeer is a software startup company which aims to make 3D printing accessible through a web-based printer remote control and monitoring app. For their launch, PrintToPeer has partnered with artist Jeff de Boer to create “Linked,” the world’s first crowdsourced 3D printed sculpture. Unique medallions 3D printed across the world will be assembled into a hanging mesh, which will form a mosaic as the intersection of art and engineering.

“We’re able to take our artist’s vision and allow anyone in the world with this technology to be the sculptor. We’re excited to demonstrate the endless possibilities and limitless creativity of the community,” says PrintToPeer co-founder, Tom Bielecki.

3D printer owners from around the world are asked to personalize an interconnecting medallion design, and ship their contribution to Calgary. Contributors are encouraged to show off their logo, equipment, materials, and 3D modelling skill, and are invited to submit as many different designs as they like.

Here’s how to get involved: PrintToPeer has built a unique online platform at http://www.printtopeer.com/sculpture. Once signed up, printer owners are given an automatically customized piece of the sculpture, which they can further modify with any image. More technically inclined participants can also download a plain medallion, and use computer-aided design software to customize it themselves.

The sculpture has been titled “Linked” to represent the connection of engineering and art, as well as the literal connecting links sent from around the world. de Boer has developed the concept from his experience with chainmail, and has designed a common linkage system to hold the pieces together. Guest artists will be invited to arrange the links into mosaics and different physical arrangements.

Printer owners are asked to ship their contributions by September 7th. Linked will be assembled during Beakerhead (September 11-15th), a city-wide festival in Calgary which celebrates the convergence of art, science, and engineering. The completed sculpture will be on display at the Calgary Maker Faire (September 14th), a festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement. This will take place at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) in Calgary.

Below is a photo gallery of the team and sculpture process.

About Jeff de Boer

Jeff de Boer is internationally known for his four distinct bodies of work: armour for cats and mice, armour for executives, exoforms, and space objects including rocket lamps. Jeff has continued to work and grow, developing new and fantastic ideas. He has also gone back to the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) where he studied Jewelry Design, this time as an instructor teaching a Jewellery Design and Presentation class. He currently has a studio in south-east Calgary, where he now works with his wife Debbie.

Here is what de Boer said about “Linked”

The distance between art and technology is beginning to not just close; it is beginning to merge.  The emergence of the 3D printer has given individuals who would not normally consider themselves makers the power to create in three dimensions.  Now that the masses can make anything, the big question will always be, “what is worth making?”

The 3D printer right now is a little bit like a television without content provided by a broadcast network.   The truth is, it is no longer necessary to have a centralized network for content, as each individual can now create the content in an open source environment.

“Linked” will be the world’s first collaborative 3D sculpture ever produced.  The idea is to demonstrate the collective power of individuals as links in an open source content generator.

I have designed a standardized linkage system on which individuals can apply their own content, print it out and send it to us so as to be linked to an ever-growing hanging sculpture.  In the end, each link will be unique, creating a vast gallery of colors and images.  The links’ wide range of colors will act like pixels and can be arranged by a guest artist to create an overall image.

This sculpture can be arranged over and over by different guest artists, each time generating a unique overall image.  The sculpture comes together in an additive way, not unlike the process of 3D printing itself.

Inside 3D Printing Chicago: Day 2

Day 2 of the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago continued to delight audiences with compelling talks and great networking. Below are the top stories from the day.

3D Systems CEO Predicts Moore’s Law Will Hit 3D Printing Technology – Inside 3D Printing Chicago

Avi Reichental, CEO of 3D Systems, keynoted Day 2 at Inside 3D Printing Chicago with a talk entitled Manufacturing the Future.

Simulation-Based Design for 3D Printing: Special Effects and the Store of the Future

Artist and designer Isaac Katz of Electronic Art Boutique gives an overview of the powerful 3D modeling software programs available on the market today.

3D Printed Fashion: From Fantasy Gowns to Accessible Couture – Inside 3D Printing Chicago

3D printed fashion designers Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti speak at the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago.

Read our recap from Day 1.

Follow us on Twitter @on3dprinting for more updates.

MGX by Materialise Leads the Charge in 3D Printing and Artist Collaboration

At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago, Joris Debo talked about a brave new art world pioneered by Materialise with their Mammoth Stereolithography 3D printing technology. Materialise is a Belgian based company that is involved in additive manufacturing (3D printing) in many industries like software development, rapid fit (automotive & aerospace), biomedical (CT & MRI scans) & orthodics among others. Debo is the Creative Director at MGX, which is the consumer goods division for Materialise and he is especially passionate about using 3D printing technology to “create objects that are both art and functional.”

MGX has become a company that closely works together with artists to come up with new pieces that would be very difficult and extremely labor intensive to make without 3D technology.  Joris noted, “When I arrived in the company eight years ago, there were two people that were not engineers. Over the years, we’ve commissioned people, like Patrick Jouin, for a new era of digital aesthetics.”

MGX is in multiple collaborations with artists and fashion designers like Iris Van Herpen for example. Van Herpen has revolutionized fashion with mesmerizing futuristic designs that push the boundaries of art and fashion. In fact, a lot of her pieces are found in museums after they hit the runway. Debo notes how like Van Herpen, the “people that make these dresses are the new craftsmen.”

3D printing also allows the combination of traditional art with very high end furniture that matches the art. Joris pointed out how if you have a Jackson Pollock in your home and you want something to match the Jackson Pollock, an artist can custom create a piece or multiple pieces of furniture to match the Jackson Pollock using MGX’s 3D printing technology. Debo further noted how it’s “not only about 3D printing but about craftsmen that can finish the pieces.” This applies to pieces of furnitures, sculptures and even art replicas like museums have begun to use recently.

The Root Chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald

Joris discussed how art pieces or historical artifacts are sometimes too fragile to travel the world and thus insurance companies will not cover their repair if broken. Moreover, some artifacts, like King Tut’s mummy for example, are irreplaceable and is too risky to move regardless of the financial cost. To show King Tut’s mummy in New York City, National Geographic partnered with MGX in order to make a perfect replica that allowed people to feel they were actually looking at the real King Tut. These kinds of partnerships make it clear as to why museums like the Smithsonian is investing in 3D printing technologies that allow for their rare pieces from fossils to sculptures to be replicated.  In sum, 3D printing technology is not only revolutionizing the industrial world, but it is already changing the aesthetics and culture around us, from clothing to furniture to historical artifacts and art pieces.

Authored by On 3D Printing contributor Rodrigo Garza Zorrilla, technology entrepreneur and advisor.

3D Printing News

A roundup of the top 3D printing news from May 28 to June 1:

Tuesday, May 28

• Maker Faire Bay Area Exhibits Grassroots 3D Printing Innovations

Wednesday, May 29

• Win an Ultimaker! 3D Printing Competition at CGTrader

Friday, May 31

• ModelBox 3D: Artists Launch Kickstarter to Bring 2D Images to Life
• 3D Printing is Now – Perspective of a Dad Entrepreneur

Saturday, June 1

• Do The Mutation: 3D Printed Masks Take Art to a New Level of Personal

Incredible Art with 3D Printed Masks

Italian designers exploring generative design have taken 3D printed art to a new level of personal. Design lab Do The Mutation developed software called Collagene to create the exquisite masks you can see in the gallery below. These masks were displayed at Milan Design Week inside the venue [Re]vive in April 2013.

Faces were scanned using a Kinect sensor, and then software generated customized masks for each person. Each mask was produced as a unique piece through 3D printing and Windform materials. The three masks were produced by CRP with their reinforced polyamide-based materials.

The designers provided this perspective on their work:

The creation of a set of masks offers the opportunity of deepening the sensibility throught a research on the relationship between body and dress, imagining the mask as the product of the growth of a virtual organism on the human face. The object keeps its traditional functions of body prosthesis, providing identity alteration and concealment, stimulating viewers’ imagination and visual association.

This project explores the border territory between physical and virtual, connecting computer code’s abstractions with the intimate, visceral dimension of body alteration’s sense brought by the mask theme. The topographic anatomy of the face acts as input for a set of algorithms that under designer’s control generate the fibers that form the object, creating a material formation that after 3d printing perfectly fits its territory, people’s faces.

The set of objects made in Windform LX 2.0, a polyamide-based material reinforced with fibre glass represent a population of differentiated individuals, phenotypes sharing the same genotype. No matter how many masks might be produced, they all will share the same genetic code. The system is then flexible in offering possibilities of formal and diagramatic variation, in creating even highly different objects, customizable on different faces and as expression of different designers.

Watch the video below to see how the masks were made and the amazing use of generative algorithms paired with 3D printing to create truly unique art.