Anatomy and Art

Yesterday was a good day.  Yesterday I saw something that I created on a computer, 3D printed into the real world.  It was a silly plastic mustache for a mustache competition my company held.  I work with a man who has a 3D printer and he asked me about making him an 3D file that he could then print for the competition.  It was a simple mustache with our logo on it, made to fit around a bottled beverage so that the mustache appears in place as you take a drink.

I’m going with just a small image here since I really don’t know much about logo rules outside of putting it on our formal images.  But I just can’t not show this at all, because well look.  Those were just computer files the other day.  That was the logo, and the mustache didn’t exist at all until I created the paths in Illustrator.  I brought everything into Cinema 4D and extruded those paths individually, gave them filleted caps, and exported .stl files for Jon who has the 3D printer.  And Jon plugged that in to his 3D printer and even played around with different colors, stopping the printer and swapping materials between the logo line and the mustache lines.  We totally pulled digital files into real 3D reality.  It’s awesome, and I want to make more things.

Then I also found myself in a unique set of circumstances yesterday to need  a figure to place into a Cinema 4D scene for a homework question.  Plan A was put on hold, but I had a little time to try something and also just happened to have a friend in town who was so kind as to help me so that I wouldn’t be taking someone else away from their job while I worked on honing this process.  I have been wanting to try something with that 123D catch software ever since I heard about it at the Medical Illustrators Conference.  So Ernest held very very still for me while I ran all around him taking pictures of him and uploading them into this software.  We tried indoors, and we tried outdoors.

We never got it quite right, but I am able to export .obj files for either of those captures and bring them into Cinema 4D and literally place Ernest there on a virtual field.  And it’s all just created by taking a series of photographs around him that the software stitches together.  It’s awesome enough that we are totally going to try this at least one more time over the weekend while he is visiting here.

So yeah, yesterday basically started with seeing the success of pulling the digital world into the physical one, and went on to make some really fun headway into being able to capture the physical world and merge it into a digital scene.  Exciting stuff!

This morning I thought that I had things to say, but tonight I can’t remember what they were.  If you are a regular reader, you may have noticed lately that my site has been down a lot.  The issue seems to have something to do with my photo gallery site and php vulnerability that keeps knocking out my photo gallery, painting gallery, and this blog all in one swoop.  It will be resolved.  And I apologize for the inconvenience of late.

Here, let me make it up to you with a couple awesome images from Danny Quirk‘s self dissection series.  He is doing some really cool stuff.

I encourage you all to go and check him out on your own!

Sometimes I am reminded how very lucky I am to be making a living doing something that I care about.  Seems like I’ve had a few conversations lately, and overheard a few more that have me thinking about that.  I may get a little overwhelmed with feeling busy sometimes, or get a little head spun about the details of whatever I’m working on from time to time.  My job takes up a lot of my time and a lot of my brain.   It would be really hard to put anywhere near the kind of time and attention I put into my job into something I didn’t care about for this long.  I’m lucky to work where I do, and to work with the people who I do.  And I know that working in a field that I care so much about affords me the opportunity to be better at it.  It’s funny how that works.  Maybe the best advice I can think to give to young people starting new careers is to look for work that they care about, or even just reasons to care about the work that they find.  It can make all the difference.

There is something awesome coming to Austin.  This weekend I finally made it to one of the planning meetings for the Austin Art Authority.  Things are still in the early phases, but it’s looking like we’re on the verge of getting an amazing venue for artists of all kinds in Austin, and a supportive community is coming together improve education in the arts, promote local artists, and get people talking to one another.  Keep your eyes open for this one.  I think it’s going to be good.

One of our speakers at the AMI conference, I’m thinking it must have been Andrew Hessel, spoke about artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg who is making portraits based on DNA from found discarded cigarette butts and gum.

About a week later I saw this article circulating around from the Smithsonian
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/05/creepy-or-cool-portraits-derived-from-the-dna-in-hair-and-gum-found-in-public-places/
which included this photo taken by Dan Phiffer, of Heather posing alongside her own DNA derived portrait.

The process, as I understand it, involves extrapolating a DNA sequence, and looking for particular genomic traits and likelihoods to construct a facial model.  She then uses a 3D printer to print the model out and finishes off the sculpture.

To answer the question posed by the Smithsonian article, it’s really pretty damn cool, and *also* super creepy in it’s implications.  In an age when Americans are panicking about their online actions being tracked, the idea of our very streets being hacked for the details of our whereabouts, and health information is downright spooky.  I know I’d rather discover such capabilities from an awesome art project like this than by really any other way though.