This week, Gizmodo got a peek at some seriously awesome sculptures made entirely by 3D printer at the 3D Printshow. The exhibit, hosted by Adobe and Shapeways, shows how you can create stunning art with nothing more than Photoshop and a 3D printer. And maybe a whole lot of talent, but we're not sure where you can buy that.
We chatted with two artists about their large-scale moving sculptures, then took a walk around the gallery to see the rest of the printed awesomeness. Here are our favorites.
Gilles Azzaro turned a 39 second snippet of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union address—in which the President mentions 3D printing—into a sci-fi physical representation of sound. The 3D-printed waveform uses height, depth, and width to represent the volume, pitch, and time, respectively, of the speech. Activated by a motion sensor on the end of the installation, a green laser tracks across the soundscape in perfect time with the audio track:
"I work in the invisible," Gilles told me. "I make invisible sound into something you can see and even touch." The five-foot-long waveform, printed in several sections, gives heft and presence to the fleeting intangibility of the human voice, the ridged texture and shiny black material reminiscent of a vinyl record.
Joshua Harker's kinetic sculpture, "Monochromatic Radiance," built from nearly 2,000 pieces, turns the motion of a hand-spun flywheel into undulating sine waves that radiate out along the 12 coils, a physical embodiment of the waves that make up both the 12 notes in a musical scale and the 12 hues on the color wheel. The crazy elaborate contraption took thousands of hours to create, printed in stages over a period of three or four months.
Joshua first used 3D printing in an industrial setting, and the minuscule mechanics of his machine, the tiny cogs and spindly pushrods, evoke the functional beauty of a turn-of-the-century factory.
Here are some of our other favorite highlights from the show. You can read more about their work here.
Images and video by Nicholas Stango