AUArts Gallery Crawl 2025!

 

Preliminary artist statement - needs to be refined and cleaned up a lot

 

My work explores the transformation of light into tangible form, merging computational processes with material experimentation. Through algorithmic drawing, computational sculpture, and generative fabrication, I develop methods that reinterpret photography as a spatial, sculptural medium. By translating images into 3D-printed topographies, I investigate the ways digital and physical mark-making converge, bridging traditional printmaking with emerging technologies, exploring how the ephemeral qualities of light and shadow can become tangible, spatial compositions and physical objects. This process allows me to engage with the expressive potential of digital fabrication - not as mere reproduction, but as a medium of abstraction, intervention, and discovery.

I develop custom algorithms that analyze the tonal structure of photographs, converting them into three-dimensional reliefs. These forms are then refined, manipulated, and fabricated using 3D printing, where layers of filament act as brushstrokes, accumulating into physical textures. The resulting works exist at the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture, challenging distinctions between image and object, surface and depth. Through this method, I treat the 3D printer as both an extension of the artist’s hand and a generative tool capable of materializing unseen dimensions within an image.

By treating the 3D printer as both a sculptor’s chisel and a printmaker’s press, I combine practices of digital and physical mark-making. My work draws from traditions of photography and printmaking while engaging with contemporary questions of machine agency and generative authorship. As I refine my process, I explore new ways of integrating color, texture, and material variation - imagining the 3D printer as a painter’s brush, capable of rendering layered, sculptural images.

As I refine my process, I aim to expand the possibilities of computational fabrication - investigating multi-color printing, adaptive resolution strategies, and hybrid approaches that incorporate hand intervention. Through these explorations, I seek to create works that challenge conventional distinctions between image and object, mark-making and materiality, human intention and algorithmic emergence, challenging the threshold between control and emergence, code and gesture, image and form.

Ultimately, my work is an inquiry into transformation - how digital and material realities inform one another, and how the interplay of light, structure, and process can yield new ways of experiencing our visual and tactile world.

algorithmic drawing, computational sculpture, and generative fabrication

 

 

Exploring the creation of an artistic practice that combines computational art, material studies, digital fabrication, and even traditional printmaking concepts.

 

I realize what I've been practically exploring is the creation of an artistic practice that combines computational art, material studies, digital fabrication, and even traditional printmaking concepts by way of algorithmic drawing, computational sculpture, and generative fabrication; now I gotta support that statement with academic reading and research.

 

 

Genuinely not sure anymore which class this is for but I've been developing a transformative process of capturing the energy of a photograph - itself captured light - and transforming that through code I've written in processing to an .stl file that can be further modified in Rhino3d (fixing holes, etc) and 3d printed - the smaller ones take close to 3 hours, the larger ~7" prints closer to about 5-6 hours, about an hour per square inch depending on settings.
I'm still refining the process - capping resolution complexity at nozzle print size is one area of optimization I need to explore, as well as working out an optimal height map depending on lights - right now pure black is very useful for manually indicating 'do not print here', but that can leave holes in a print of variable lighting.

Lots of things to improve, but at some point I'd like to explore ways of automatic photo translation to multi-color filament prints - even if simplified. There's potential here of creating (even if multi-panel) abstract 3d printed paintings involving colored filament, treating the print bed as a canvas and the printer nozzle as a brush. 

And this ties back to exploring methods of using a 3d printer as a pen plotter, CNC as a pen plotter - what if adapting that manually to treating it as a literal (if pla-filament based) - pen?
Lots of things to explore here that I've been sort of exploring outside of the direct class bounds.

 

And this last one here is the North entrance from SAIT, that long hallway to 3L on the left and the library if you keep going to the end and turn left. So far clear simple compositions with strong perspective and releatively even lighting gradients work best for this process, although of course I'm still experimenting and optimizing here too.

 

 

CNC drawing!

Me Garrison and Fatima learned all the ways to screw up a CNC drawing, which means we learned a ton along the way to making it work - from not being able to parse the password, fighting with gcode and setup, unlocking the machine after a mis-placed negative rammed it the wrong way, figuring out correct pen z-axis distance, and a whole lot of other things too long to fit in the intro here, here's the CNC drawing I managed to get out in time alloted, in reverse order from finished (in-classroom, the must be a popular color because it started dying halfway through) to how it started; and I'm pretty sure I had my speed set way too low, but that's something to know for next time:

Mona Lisa and Door

Still developing the process - there's an easy half dozen or more things I want to improve - but here's a 3d print of the Mona Lisa, as well as a larger scale of the fourth floor stairwell door.

 

Photo thorugh Processing to .stl

Developed a process that take a heightmap of an image and gaussian smooths it a bit so it's not all crazy and then converts it in a .stl file for 3d printing - I'm still working out the whole workflow process.  Too small and detail gets hard to make out, too big and it takes a long time, which is fine but something I need to keep in mind

 So far works best with images with large shapes and strong contrast, at least at this scale
 

Too small and detail gets hard to make out, too big and it takes awhile, which is fine but something I need to keep in mind 

At some point I want to experiment with inverted heightmaps for lineart and charcter art, see how I could finess that given a thick enough pre-set baseplate