tool-discuss: a new forum

Hi. Apologies for the intruding into your forum with a tangential post, but I've been following the RepRap work for several months now, and am really intrigued and excited about it. I'm an architecture grad student at the university of toronto -- we have a fairly well equiped fab lab over here that includes both a plaster and an ABS printer, and a 3 axis miller. Having dropped more than enough money on 3d prints over the past few years, I can appreciate how remarkable an inexpensive, open-source system could be.

The reason I'm posting here is because I'm starting a forum that may be of interest to some of you, and I hope some of you will subscribe: the forum is devoted to the intersection of open-source tools/methods with interactive art, and design. Attached is a full description of the forum.

Yours,
Liav Koren

www.beige-box.org

There is an exciting niche to be filled. The development of open-source platforms, applications and methodologies mean that there are now unprecedented options available to those working with interactive art, media, and design. However, to make use of these tools effectively entire skill sets often must be acquired, communities must be found and joined, and a wide range of technical and theoretical issues must be confronted. There is no centralized forum devoted to examining the full spectrum of issues surrounding interactive media tools from the perspective of artists, designers, and theorists. The tool-discuss forum seeks to fill this niche. Currently the forum exists as a mailing list -- appropriate topics examine issue surrounding open-source software, hardware and methodologies from technical, artistic, critical, and sociological perspectives.

Some of the potential issues we feel worth exploring include:

Begin to question definitions. The idea of "open source" has already been pushed itself outside the world of software. How far can it be taken? Collage work from the early 20th century and sampling/appropriation in music both seem to be significant precedents for a kind of open methodology.

Begin to expand the range of discussion: a huge number of interesting software packages are out there. But what about hardware? How can we begin to make physical things and start to interface them with computers, software, people, institutions, stuff?

How do we choose what to work with, and how do our tools affect us?

How do people join communities of practice based around various tools, and how can connections be made between different communities? Some resources, like Processing, for example, have very healthy and active communities. How does something like this evolve?

How can we begin to provide a forum for people to present and discuss their work in interesting ways, and begin to make contact with others? Tool-discuss is intend to be only a first step: in the summer we'll begin work on a web-based forum. What should that forum look like?

We look forward to lively and active discussion, and further developing tool-discuss in the near future into a robust clearinghouse devoted to the intersection of open-source issues and media arts.

Subscription: www.beige-box.org

Liav Koren,
tool-discuss list owner,
liav@beige-box.org

thats pretty cool. has there been any discussion of reprap on that list yet? i just joined and i dont want to re-hash something thats already been discussed.

Did you seen anything on the lists yet? It looked to me like they've just opened it.

Yes, the forum has just been launched. And, actually, my first posting was some general thoughts on rapid prototyping -- any further thoughts/comments are more than welcome!

.Liav

Here's a copy of a recent kick-off message I posted to the forum:


To get things started here, I thought I'd share some thoughts from my last few years as an architecture student.

I was introduced to rapid prototyping and 3d printing early in my architecture degree. The first time I ever handled 3d prints, there was, in the back of my mind, a bit of a dull horror that was largely overwhelmed by a general fascination with the things I was looking at -- they were wondfully complex, tasteful, abstract formal studies that a pair of instructors at the school had produced [1] as a study for 2002 Pentagon memorial competition. As unsettling as the purpose of the objects/proposal was, and as interesting as the thoughtful formalism was, though, what still sticks with me four years later, was a strange fascination/revolution with the homogeneous, mildly voxelated milky whiteness of the ABS plastic forms [2]. Only now, formalizing these thoughts into words, do I think of Moby Dick, and the horror of the white whale.

It was a few years later before I felt that particular frisson again. In the meantime, I'd spent hours and hours working with the school's laser cutting, sometimes watching the head, mesmerized by the point of light where the laser burned out contours on thin sheets of millboard with mechanical grace[3], or watching over the computer controlled router, as it milled out sinuous loops through stacks of laminated foam or wood. We're fortunate to have this infrastructure available to us, and it is often used so casually that it quickly becomes familiar, if not banal to us.

A year or two ago I came across the reprap project, and recovered a bit of that sense of squeamishness that I first felt. There's a Bertrand Russel sound bite in which he spoke of chemical imperialism -- that living things at their most basic level, seeks "to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself." The reprap project is well along in development of very inexpensive, open source 3d printers [4]. They can also print their own parts: RepRap = Replicating Rapid Prototyper.

We'd always joked about going on insane printing sprees. We'd have brief gags about printing complete dinning sets, furniture in snap-together pieces, projectiles to throw at critics during presentations that were going badly. The possibility of cheap, ubiquitous printing, though, brings this out of the realm of things-that-are-worth-a-at-2-in-the-morning. This is one of the most interesting projects I've come across, and it still evokes a certain novel mix of excitement and queasiness.

It's interesting and worth further exploring, that the the wider and wider availability of tools to describe and produce complex forms, combined with just in time methodologies, has given us movements in art and design that, in some ways might be a sort of neo-baraque or neo-art-neauve [5], on the one hand, and the possibility for massive, decentered, grass-roots tool and resource production on the other.



1. [www.williamsonwilliamson.com]. Pentagon Memorial entry. 2002. The memorial proposal itself was an object that evoked a trace of loss: a large block from which numerous smaller pieces had been subtracted, leaving a strange, cubic landscape/voidscape. "Physically the individual memorials represent the positive form of a subtraction from the collective memorial.... the resulting niches and ledges in the collective memorial are not only markers for the one hundred eighty four individuals, but places in which visitors can leave mementos..."

2. A voxel is the equivalent of a pixel, in 3d -- a VOLume ELement. Anything that gets fed into an additive rapid prototyper is translated into voxels, and, as at our school, is spat out some a day or two later as ABS plastic that has been melted and extruded through a tiny nozzle into a solid form.

3. Afterward, when I'd look up, I might see retinal purple splotches for a few seconds, and worry briefly.

4. I've seen estimated prices range from $150 - $400, vs. $30k for a commercial printer.

5. Contemporary designers working with organic or blob forms should probably include not just Frank Gehry, but NOX, led by Lars Spuybroek; Greg Lynn; Hernan Diaz Alonso, Peter Cook, Mark Goulthorpe, and many others.

links
[www.makezine.com]
[www.fabathome.org]
[3dreplicators.com]
[reprap.org]

very nice.... i think you accurately describe the way many on this project feel about it.

personally, i'm both excited and wowed by the potentials the future holds. this project in particular provides an amazing potential to change the way people interact with their technology and also physical objects.