Components of their work for the exhibition “Will the Seas Survive us?” at Sainsbury Centre, March-August 2025 (UK) are slowly taking on their desired shape.
In 2024 Nabuurs&VanDoorn started to experiment with iNNOVATIONSPACE Art and Tech at the Technical University Eindhoven to reproduce a 17th century ethnographic object from the Sainsbury collection. What originally was carved from wood by hand now is printed by a machine in layers of corn-based plastics. Both original as copy function as character and object, mascot and talisman, lookout and indicator, edge and limit, the original was used as figurehead and is named “Fisherman’s God”, and the copy will be part of the art installation named Gathering of Gods. The artists use of technology enables them to create a portal between ancient and future worlds.
It's important to the artists that the 3D printed objects are not perfect and immaculate, but instead appear as faulty imitations of the ethnographic model, printed layers remain visible, bearing marks of the high-tech machine. This strips nostalgia of the spiritual object and confronts real belief systems. It will make spectators look at the relic with new eyes.
After multiple failures we changed printers from UltiMaker to Bambu. The technical coordinator electronics, Estevao Pereira, advised us to slice the object in three parts and reduce support structure. The support structure is there to keep the unfinished object in printing position. When printing is finished the support structure should be broken off and peeled from the printed object. To keep the print in position and minimize support structure the slice profile needs to stay below a thirty-degree angle. The Bambu gives the skin of the printed object a texture comparable with pixels or the net-structure from the computer program Fusion 360. The skin of the object, like the city grid, frames earthly life. The squares that map the city grid become the mesh or net-structure that map the 3D-printed object.
"Three-dimensional printing is only the tip of the iceberg, just one of a host of digital techniques for scanning, visualization, and modeling that profoundly alter how we make things—but also how we understand and represent the world around us, how we see and what we experience. Until now, modern culture and technology have been largely image-based; images, in other words, were the primary means of recording and transmitting information about the world. But 3-D printing is merely the most visible symptom of a paradigm shift in global technology and culture from the visual to the spatial " (Mario Carpo in Artforum).
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