With the democratization of digital fabrication tools many digital artists have experimented with physical object-making and vice versa. While “virtual sculpture” is not really a genre distinct from 3D animation, there are many CGI artists with a distinctly sculptural sense.
Here are some examples:
Dark Matter by Morehshin Allahyari (2014-2015)
Also check She Who Sees the Unknown and Material Speculations: ISIS
Shiv Integer by Plummer Fernandez (2006)
Liberator variations by Kyle McDonald
Fauna In The Temple by Auriea Harvey (2021)
Interview
Zium Society – various artists
Museum of Other Realities – various artists
How To Everything by Theo Triantafyllidis (2016)
Lattice-Face Parameter Chant by Brenna Murphy
If the website it too challenging do a google image search
Also check the game Holovista
Bread prosthetics by zeitguised 2020 – instagram (includes commercial work)
Dauphin 007 by Jonathan Monaghan (2011)
A museum of dubious splendors by Studio Oleomingus (2018)
Brainstorm
Assignment: Create a virtual sculpture by using 3D models found online.
On paper.
List of 10 objects with interesting silhouettes, iconic value.
Think of common objects with some kind of baggage, history, or built-in symbolism..
Cover at least 5 of these categories:
tools/instruments/toys,
food,
furniture/industrial design,
fashion/accessories,
animals,
plants,
buildings/built environment,
vehicles
Swap the list with a student next to you and ask them to write abstract concepts they associate with such object. Eg: gun -> violence, America, crime, police…
Team up with the other student try to cross your lists to see if interesting resonances, dissonances, hybridizations emerge from the pair.
On your own.
Make a list of materials, it doesn’t have to be accessible accessible to you: water, moon stone, gold, human flesh…
Crosslist the materials and the objects and see if any interesting relation emerge from the pairing.
Part 2
Make another list like the first one. And let’s sketch out some ideas.
Let’s look at some well known sculptures that incorporate found objects (or reproductions of everyday objects) and analyze how they operate formally:
Shape analogy, mimicry (as in an object tries to be something else), Sculptural mashup, Natural / artificial contrast.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction, process
Deconstructed / reassembled
Making a functional object unusable
Making a non functional object “usable”
Conceptual. What could be a conceptual approach to this assignment?
Check pippin barr’s v r 3 or the stolen art museum or his piece in the Zium museum
Symmetry, accumulation, cloning (orderly)
Accumulation (disorderly), monumental
Accumulation, by material/type and color
Accumulation and composition, by category/quality
Based on a coat of traditional Asian armor, this sculpture is composed from thousands of polished military dog tags. As the title indicates, the work juxtaposes the collective-represented by the armored sculpture-and the individual-symbolized by the dog tags, each representing a single soldier.
Accumulation (structured)
González-Torres’ partner Ross Laycock was diagnosed with AIDS, and died of it the same year as “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)’s creation. pile of candies should ideally weigh 175 pounds (79 kg)—Laycock’s body weight when healthy. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece and the artwork’s owner are to decide if it will be replenished.
Accumulation (disorderly), abstract/conceptual (objects as portrait), participatory, unmonumental
Innuendo, abstraction, “portraiture”.
Can you make a portrait with objects?
Scale (Not a found object obv)
High culture / low culture contrast. Style transfer?
Assemblage, artificial Natural contrast, visual correspondences
Reference (to art history classic statue, roman salute), subtraction/sectioning, context (stock exchange, fascist building)
Material, scale, texture (albedo/diffuse in 3d terms)
Material change
Immersive Installation Art
Artists have been creating immersive worlds from way before the diffusion of simulation technologies. Installation art encompasses a lot of what was traditionally referred as sculpture and the label is applied to almost anything that exists in a gallery space, including video and sound art, but here some examples of artists that completely create or transform environments to be traversed by visitors.
Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters. six rooms of the family house in Hanover “renovated” between 1923 and 1933
James Turrell
Ganzfeld effect. A phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field. The effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. The noise is interpreted in the higher visual cortex, and gives rise to hallucinations.
Gallery of Modern Art
installation view
Yayoi Kusama – The Obliteration Room
Yayoi Kusama
Started the infinity rooms in the ’60, but also pioneered pop art and feminist art.
Penetrables
Jesús Rafael Soto – Kinetic/Op-art installation Penetrable
Olaffur Oliasson – The weather Project, 2003
Olafur used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a circular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light. The ceiling of the hall was covered with a huge mirror, in which visitors could see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light
Stretchy biomorphic touchable installations, occasionally filled with spices.
Tomás Saraceno – artist/architect
Anish Kapoor – Creator of the bean sculpture in Chicago
Richard Serra – Most of his works are monumental public sculptures but some of them are environments.
Do Ho Suh. Korean Light polyester, recreating the houses he lived in.
Chiharu Shiota – Japanese
Thomas Hirschhorn (Swiss) – Cheap materials “universal, economic, inclusive, and don’t bear any plus-value”
Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue – Killjoy’s castle