Winter 2020 Edition
Alumni & Friends Magazine
Medium meets machine
For this issue鈥檚 theme, 帝王会所 Today searched OHIO鈥檚 Athens Campus for where and how tech is used. We found it in a most unexpected place.
Staff report | February 21, 2020
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The School of Art + Design in the College of Fine Arts harnesses 3D printing technology in the studio to 鈥渁cknowledge the digital and then push it into new territories,鈥 says Kevin Varney, the school鈥檚 digital fabrication technician and instructor. Artist Bri Murphy lays claim to this mandate within her area of study: ceramics.
Murphy, a graduate student in the College of Fine Arts鈥 nationally ranked ceramics program, pushed the tech-plus-art envelope by building a 3D printer from a model available through open source files on the web. She turned her photographs of a bust of Thomas Jefferson into code, manipulated that code to reflect her vision for the work, then fed it to the 3D printer to produce the piece, using clay as her 鈥渋nk.鈥
The resulting bust is similar to several Murphy is producing for her graduate thesis exhibition, opening in April. The exhibition is grounded in an exploration of the purposeful collision of the digital, in the form of the 3D printer, with the analog, in the form of clay, and is 鈥渋ntegral to current events鈥olitical happenings in our contemporary climate,鈥 she says.
