Monday 24 April 2017

Finding Your Foundations

Additive manufacturing. Perhaps better known as 3D printing.
Although it is often lauded as the great technology of the future, as of yet there is no great, good, or even well-known young artist who has found a way to exploit the medium for his trademark practice.
It might seem odd that this fast method of creating three-dimensional form has had no direct influence on the arts, yet this has a simple and straightforward explanation. The technology is too young and has no real reference for its mechanics. It quite simply hasn't yet had the time to establish a baseline. Furthermore, any possible odd interpretation of the technology which could be considered art will simply be included in the implicit canon of what is 'normal' functionality for such a machine.

Most new technologies, or media, such as photography, video games or the printing press, were not considered as art forms until several decades after their initial introduction. This is not due to any stubbornness of old-fashioned art critics, but simply the time it takes for a medium to develop a baseline whose logic can be distorted or negated. In other words, until it can used to make art.
Whether or not a specific medium is art is an irrelevant question as whether or not art is possible in any medium, material, technique or situation relies solely on whether or not a basic framework has been accepted for it, implicitly or otherwise. If something has any kind of properties it is expected to posses, then there is also art to be made out of it.
Until that time comes though, people are merely trying to understand what this thing is and what its implications are.