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 I
Assignment: Assignment: Create a virtual sculpture by using 3D models found online.
On paper.
Make a list of common objects with some kind of baggage, history, or built-in symbolism.
Pass it to the student on your left and ask them to write abstract concepts they associate with such object. Eg: gun -> violence, America, crime, police…
Team up with the student on your right and 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.
Brainstorm II
List of 10 objects with interesting silhouettes, iconic value, or built-in associations as discussed last time. Cover at least 5 of these categories:
tools/instruments/toys,
food,
furniture/industrial design,
fashion/accessories,
animals,
plants,
buildings/built environment,
vehicles
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
(Post crit) Release Strategy
A virtual gallery, in first person, web based. What style/plan?