Fluid Borders:
The Aesthetic Evolution of Digital Sculpture(con't)
                                                                                                 by Christiane Paul
Developments, Access and Availability

For all of the sculptors, the possibility of designing and creating sculptures that couldn't be realized with traditional practices is the primary reason for their use of digital technologies. The exploration of the extent to which computing technologies may give rise to new possibilities of thinking about and producing sculpture is the major factor in Keith Brown's work. As Dan Collins puts it, the technology is too precious, too time-consuming and too learning-intensive to expect anything less than the creation of work that couldn't be accomplished in any other way.

The technological developments over the past couple of years have made it possible to control the kind and degree of distortion imposed on a given object or data set, as Dan Collins sums it up. Scaling operations, proportional shifts, eccentric vantage points, morphing processes, and 3D montage are some of the techniques his body of work explores. Keith Brown finds new developments in Layer Manufacturing techniques and the introduction of wider ranges of material have been of particular importance.

For Derrick Woodham, the "mutual reality" environment provided by Active Worlds constitutes a technological development that will affect his work in the most profound way. He is still gathering the pieces of his experience in DAAP, negotiating the extent of his engagement with the present and future capabilities of the application, and feels that it is too early to step back and objectively evaluate.

Over the past couple of years, the availability of technological tools has definitely improved; there are now more companies that build data capture and output devices, which has lowered unit costs, and there have been consistent improvements and cost reductions in all CAD/3D animation programs and related hardware.

Dan Collins and his colleagues set out to build a fully capable lab at Arizona State University in 1994 and now that PRISM functions as a working prototype - equipped with state of the art computers, laser scanners, and several output devices -- he feels that he is only beginning to get started. Keith Brown also sees a generally democratizing effect when it comes to costs. He is eagerly waiting for the affordable 3D desktop printer, (which will supposedly be available in two years) and Robert Michael Smith is convinced that the day of the 3D Kinko's is imminent. Million-dollar visualization technology has become available to even the grassroots digital sculptor for well under a thousand dollars, as Smith puts it.

Although there have been significant advances in Rapid Prototyping processes, Smith points out that availability still is a major problem because of very high production costs -- an experience that is shared by Michael Rees who states that all the access he received has been won at great effort on his part and feels that artists are largely left out of the mix.