User:Emielgilijamse
Digital Craft: Practice Q9 "How to be human"
"On the body"
Project 1: Exploring bespoke technologies as remediation, adaptions or extensions of the human body
'What I wanted to achieve was to find a relevant example of a traditional technique using a modeling methode as used in modeling software.'
At this point I am especially interested in the "craft" in "digital craft'. I decided to interpret the human body as a toolkit. Focusing on the finger, which is giving us the ability to create forms and shape objects in traditional crafts. Looking back in history, the hand and its finger were one of the first and most essential tools used by man to shape and form. Especially looking at ceramics and sculptures, in which our hands and fingers are still essential. But in our digital age we've defined different ways of creating, inspired by our manual methods, but different in possibilties and approach.
Where the traditional ways of shaping materials like clay, direct contact with the material is inevitable, the modern modeling process takes place in a digital enviroment. Software like Meshmixer and Sculptris gives you the possibilty to pull and push an unlimited amount of mass, giving you endless possibilties, which are practically impossible using the traditional ways of shaping by hand. I wanted to design and create an extension of the human finger. Combining traditional ways of shaping, inspired by the modern approach of modeling as seen in free-form modeling software.
Research
Starting with the absolute basics, take a piece of clay and shape it by hand. Trying to come up with a way this material or method could be shaped as in Meshmixer. Moving on to the software, I decided to focus on one set of tools provided in the software, the brushes. These brushes can be used to sculpt the volume or the surface to shape your object. I wanted to translate these digital tools into a real life tool which can be physically used to create an object.
The way of shaping in the software can easily be compared with a phenomenon well known to us all, magnetism. What if the extension of the finger could work like a magnet on the material, being able to shape as in the software. I started to run some tests
