Abstract

Keywords: Physicalization, Post-digital, 3D printing, Solid modeling, Digital fabrication, Natural Language Understanding, 3D Data.

A series of creative text physicalizations are accounted for herein, with reference to research literature and, most importantly, to an experimental algorithmic system designed and implemented by the author. The latter concerns a series of experimental pipelines that ‘understand’ the input text generating keywords, that utilize them to query 3D data from WWW, and, finally, that transfigure and merge the latter so that new original artefacts are synthesized. The various physical, digital, and post-digital material affordancies of the resulting physicalizations are scrutinized in some depth and in an analytic fashion. Objects of sorts are shown to be ascribed a certain kind of emergent neo-materiality, in that they are themselves hybrid manifestations of interwoven physical and digital affairs. As such, they constitute situated inquiries of the very same (technological) paradigms that brought them forth, as well as of their cultural and ideological offshoots. Physicalizations of sorts are shown to be ‘Herzian’, post-optimal, and disruptive, being both the creative means towards an exploration of new kinds of materiality/objecthood, and an implicit critique of the canonical functional design schemata that largely pertain digital fabrication nowadays.

• Marinos Koutsomichalis is a scholar, artist and creative technologist. His practice is hybrid, nomadic, and ethnographic, involving field-work, creative coding, critical theory, making, lecturing, live performance, workshopping, artist/research residencies, ‘Doing-It-With-Others’, and hands-on experimentation with materials and technologies of all sorts. In this way, it draws on, and concerns, various subareas in arts, humanities, science, technology, philosophy, and design. His artistic corpus is prolific, yet persistently revolving around the same few themes: material inquiry/exploration; self-erasure (in/through performance and production tactics of all sorts); the quest for post-selfhood (through social, hybrid, and networked practices involving both human and nonhuman actors). He has hitherto publicly presented his work, pursued projects, led workshops, and held talks worldwide more than 250 times and in all sorts of milieux: from leading museums, acclaimed biennales, and concert halls, to industrial sites, churches, project spaces, academia, research institutions, underground venues, and squats. He has a PhD in Electronic Music and New Media (De Montfort University, GB) and a MA in Composition with Digital Media (University of York, GB), has held research positions at the Department of Computer Science in the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (Trondheim, NO) and at the Interdepartmental Centre for Research on Multimedia and Audiovideo in the University of Turin (IT), and has taught at the University of Wolverhampton (Birmingham, UK), the Center of Contemporary Music Research (Athens, GR), and the Technical University of Crete (Rethymnon, GR). He is a Lecturer in Multimedia Design for Arts at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology (Limassol, CY).

Full text (PDF) p. 112-119