Sophie Kahn – YEAR 2| RAYVENN SHALEIGHA D'CLARK| THEORETICAL

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/sophie-kahn-and-the-art-of-3d-scanning-and-printing

3D Sculptor Creates High Art Death Masks

3D printing seems to have nearly endless applications, from spacecraft production, to fashion, to dental hygiene. It’s also proved fertile ground for established artists, who are using the increasingly available technology, along with 3D scanning, to explore new territory. For sculptor Sophie Kahn, both technologies are essential. Using 3D laser scanning and printing, Kahn creates work that demonstrates the “impossibility of ever capturing more than a trace of the past, or of a living, breathing body,” even as our imaging technology becomes more accurate. It takes the traditional goal of sculpture — to preserve an image as precisely and permanently as possible — on its head. For Kahn, her artistic process is tied to notions of memory and loss. Looking at one of her sculptures, like viewing an old photograph, she said, is a reminder of a brief moment in time that has since passed. “The act of recording is emotionally laden for one reason or another. When I’m capturing a face or a body that’s never far from my mind,” Kahn said. “It’s strange too, because I have scans of my own face that are 10 years old and my cheeks were so chubby. I looked so young. I was 21 in some of them. I scan my face now and I see how my face has shifted over time. I find that really bizarre and kind of fascinating too.” 3D laser scanners are made to capture stationary objects. Consequently, when Kahn defies that design by running her scanner over a human face or body, the person’s slight movements causes fragmentation in the scanned image. Kahn then turns the image into a sculpture with 3D printed plastic or by casting it in metal or clay.

It’s an imperfect, splintered recreation, one that Kahn often deliberately damages even more to give the sculpture the look of an ancient archeological discovery.

Kahn’s latest work, Triple Portrait of Evie, represents a new approach. While scanning, her subject, a student at Connecticut College, had the idea to turn her head and repeat the scan. They did that three times, resulting in a multiple exposure. The final scan was subjected to a glitching process, causing a crystalline effect that looks like digital rot or decay. As Kahn explained to us, 3D printing and scanning are useful techniques for artists seeking to make traditional objects in new ways, using new materials. We asked Kahn to show us the work of some of her contemporaries who are using these processes for artistic innovation:

Jill Magid – “I am fascinated by forensic reconstruction and incomplete evidence, and in this work, Jill Magid had her head CT scanned and then worked with a forensic artist in the Netherlands to rebuild it. The artist had never seen her face, and only saw a photograph of her after the reconstruction was done,” Kahn said.
Claudia Hart – “Claudia was my mentor in graduate school, and she is doing a great deal to build a theoretical context around art and 3D, though her own work and through other projects. I originally got in touch with her because I was inspired by her Mortification series which takes the female body and subjects it to various digital damage, before 3D printing it,” Kahn said.
Geoff Mann – “Geoff Mann’s Shine is one of my favorite pieces incorporating 3D scanning and printing. It was made by laser scanning a candelabra, and all the glitches that result from scanning a reflective surface are preserved in the 3D print. I love how the reflected light became solidified – like a materialization of light,” she said.
Tom Burtonwood – Kahn recommends Burtonwood’s 3D printed accordion book, Orihon. The book consists of 3D scans made of multiple digital photographs of sculptures and reliefs found at The Art Institute of Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Barry X. Ball – “Barry X Ball’s CNC milled portraits are beautiful, and they make an interesting study in versions and seriality. Very similar 3D files can look completely different depending on the material in which they are made. Even the color of the marble transforms them completely. It’s a good reminder to me that every material has its own history, and its own resonance and presence,” Kahn said.

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http://www.sophiekahn.net

http://www.sophiekahn.net/#!portraits/c199t

Artists Statement:

My work owes its fragmented aesthetic to the interaction of new and old media, or the digital and the analog. I combine cutting-edge technology, like 3d laser scanning and 3d printing, with ancient bronze casting techniques. I create sculptures and videos that resemble de-constructed monuments or memorials. They engage questions of time, history, vision, identity and the body.

The precise 3d scanning technology I use was never designed to capture the body, which is always in motion. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial coordinates, generating fragmented results: a 3d ‘motion blur’. From these scans, I create videos or 3d printed molds for metal or clay sculptures. The resulting objects bear the artifacts of all the digital processes they have been though.

They also speak to the impossibility of ever capturing more than a trace of the past, or of a living, breathing body, despite our grandest efforts to fix it in place.

This concern with the instability of memory and representation is the common thread that weaves together the ancient and futuristic aspects of my work.

Sophie Kahn’s work addresses the resonances of death in the still image. It owes its fragmented aesthetic to the interaction of new and old media, and the collision of the body with imaging technology.

I combine cutting-edge means of reproduction, like 3d laser scanning and 3d printing, with ancient bronze casting techniques. Using damaged 3d data, I create sculptures and video works that resemble de-constructed monuments or memorials.

The precise 3d scanning technology I use was never designed to capture the body, which is always in motion. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial coordinates, generating a 3d ‘motion blur’. From these scans, I create videos or life-sized 3d printed mold sculptures. The resulting sculptures bear the artifacts of all the digital processes they have been though.

The scanning and 3d printing process strips color and movement from the body, leaving behind only traces of its form – a scan of the face resembles nothing more than a digital death mask.

Like a photograph, a 3d scan is made from life, and from a limited perspective. When materialized as sculpture, it reveals losses and blind spots, frayed edges, and voids in the solid object that stand for all the things that the scanner could not see.

I come from a photography background, and I strive to capture in my work something that photographers have always known: we use technology to stop time, but we end up with a still image instead — which is something else entirely.

Tom McCarthy, citing Freud, has argued that

…all technology is haunted by the desire to freeze time and hedge against death, but that paradoxically, in assembling vast digital archives, we are really building our own tombs.

New modes of technological reproduction only heighten the eeriness of duplication: witness the ‘uncanny valley’ of simulated humanness in 3d cinema and video games.

I scan my own body frequently, but what I end up with is a series of digital doppelgangers with a (n after-) life of their own. These scans, realized as life-size 3d printed statues and installed in darkened rooms as a damaged ancient artifact might be, serve as a incomplete memorials to the body as it moves through time and space.

I work with this deathly imagery not because I want to be morbid, but because I am interested in the ways that technology can fail to capture life – and what the poetics of that failure might look like

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