Professional Development at Museum of Arts and Design, Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital

I attended an amazing professional development for educators that celebrated the new exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) titled Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital. It was a day packed with a lot of activity with an artist talk and tour and two fun and informative workshops that related to the exhibition. I would love to take some students on a tour via ArtEsteem, so please contact me if you want to arrange a group visit. The expansive exhibition covers three floors and showcases a variety of 21st-century artist creations that utilize advanced methods of computer-assisted production known as digital fabrication in their artwork. Think 3-D printing, laser cutting, and digital knitting.

Artist Talk

Alissia Melka-Teichroew started the morning with an inspiring artist talk and presented her story and artwork. She is a New York-based industrial designer who is featured in Out of Hand that exhibits her jointed jewels that use 3-D printing. She grew up in the Netherlands and talked about how her culture and environment had a huge impact on how she thinks about design. She described the Netherlands as being very efficient in design and how they plan everything from how they design and organize their tax forms and money to architecture and bikes ... she emphasized how the Dutch really plan everything to maximize use and aesthetic with funny quips and photos that accompanied her presentation. I really liked her approach to her design process where she stated that she "thinks from a story, not a material." The story is what drives her creations and the making and fabricating comes after ... "So the material needs to enhance, strengthen the story I am trying to tell through design."

Alissia Melka-Teichroew, New York based Industrial Designer

Alissia shared some of her projects and I especially liked her clever and playful Tiffany inspired Diamond Sterling Silver Ring, which is emblematic of love and marriage. She takes the classic style and silhouette and puts her spin on it by slicing it (with no real diamond) and making it out of an unconventional material like acrylic or sterling silver thus making it modern and edgy. It tells a story about our obsession with jewelery and status and the idea is that you can buy as many as you want because her rings are inexpensive.

She also created collections of Jointed Jewels that combine the old with the new that conjures up images of the plastic Pop-It Beads from the 1950s. Alissia puts a modern twist on this idea and utilizes 3-D printing to manufacture the pieces. Although they are jointed like ball joints, the jewelry is actually made in one-piece and not assembled. Another design challenge she presented to herself using digital fabrication was how small can you make something wearable without breaking it utilizing the 3-D printing process.


Exhibition
The exhibition Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital has something for everyone and does a beautiful job showcasing the work and describing the processes the artists used to generate their creations. We toured the exhibition and collected raw data about the work by choosing a theme and writing down our observations in regards to the theme we choose. Observing the art and collecting information in regards to comparative themes is a great activity for adults and students and something I will definitely incorporate into future lessons. It allows you to analyze the work and form important questions about what you are looking at and how it can be used or viewed. Some theme examples included: Figurative vs Non-Figurative, Art vs Design, Synthetic vs Natural, Functional vs Non-functional, and Digital vs Non-digital

 Below are are a few highlights from the show.

Nervous System, Hyphae Pendant Lamps, 2013, Nylon, LED lights

I love these modern, organic lights that blur the lines between art and design, as well as synthetic vs natural from the duo known as Nervous System. The patterns they project on the wall are almost as powerful as the fabrication of the lights themselves. Science meets art meets nature meets technology in these digitally fabricated works. Nervous System also makes affordable cool jewelry and art objects inspired by science and nature that are generated by technology. Check out their website here and learn more about them.

Clone Chair, Julian Mayor

Original Queen Anne side chair

Juilan Mayor is a designer based in East London who created a replica of the Queen Anne side chair and used the original chairs "DNA" to create a laser cut plywood chair made of vertical pieces of wood. I like idea of replicating an object and putting a modern twist on it and creating something new from the old by transforming the process and/or materials.

Untitled, 2008, Concrete, pigment, Anish Kapoor

When I first saw these works I thought they were handmade out of clay ... but this is a digital fabrication show, and to learn about how they were made and the concept behind the work was an aha moment. I was amazed how the fabrication process mimics nature and it is almost impossible to tell the difference between handmade and made by machine.

Untitled, 2008, Concrete, pigment, Anish Kapoor (wall piece)

“The hand of the artist is much estimated as the means by which the expression of art finds a voice. To make art without a hand is a goal that sets art beyond expression. Artists have found ways to subvert the means of production. Some three years ago, Adam Lowe and I wondered if it were possible to make a machine that could generate form. The printing machine formed a model for the basis of our thinking. After much trial and error, we found a surprisingly simple way of making a workable engine. Once we started making objects, a new reality began to emerge. These objects were like no others; they seemed to obscure the border between artifice and event. These are objects more akin to natural things than those made by design."

           – Anish Kapoor

Hands-on Workshops

Finally, we educators had the opportunity to make our own objects and learn more about 3-D printing. The company Solidoodle has partnered with MAD during this exhibition and demonstrated the 3-D printing process and software needed to produce small objects that range in the 6 x 6 inch range. They are based in Brooklyn and you can learn more about them here. We learned about creating an original model or finding one online, how to convert the model into something (code!) that the printer can understand and then how the printer melts and uses a filament to produce a plastic model. Another cool resource to learn more about models and 3-D printing is at the website Thingiverse that features model collections that allow you to explore and create your won 3-D objects. The printers we used in the workshop run about $600.00 (not bad!).

 

 

 The second workshop was hands-on and used craft materials like straws, cardboard, colored wire, scissors and tape to make sculptures that reflected strange statistics (like you blink over 10,000,000 times a year or a dragonfly’s first six months of life are spent underwater.) that may or may not be true. This is a great activity to do with students that could generate a worthy discussion about fact finding and what makes a reliable resource on the Internet.  This workshop correlated to the artist talk early in the day, where we had to tell a story about the statistic, then incorporate the materials we had on hand. It forced us to tell a story and the materials were secondary in the process.

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