MINNEAPOLIS––Brian Boldon‘s latest body of work Bodyplan, featuring stacked porcelain pillars, employs automation––3D printing––as an physical archival tool of “evolutionary biology and human taxonomy.”
Earth as recorder, kiln as creator, I use geologic process as a generative force, tapping into human origins and contemporary experience. I think of material transformation as creative non-fiction, record keeping for physical phenomenon and temporal events. Situations are assembled in kilns with unknown outcomes. New equilibriums are discovered.
Boldon adds his artistic process has become entangled with his extruding machines which bring to question what does this technological dependency mean for artists, culture and to the definition of what is it is to be Human.
I am an active participant, an artist recording the present for self-reflection and navigation. 3D prints become physical records of desire and action, my methodology for developing new philosophies and cultural perspectives.
He says Bodyplan came to him fully formed as a way to speak to these new cultural relationships with technology, when he began exploring 3D printing in 2017. For his work, Boldon gathered gestural data which he then actualized into his 3-dimensional towers.
I used skeletal movement and cubic volume data to further understand the body in motion. Degrees of flexion are converted to radial energy automating the human gait. Mineral, botanical, biological and mechanical elements lose their hierarchy. New relationships form as segments of meaning assembled together as silicate beings.
The same forces that act on our bodies, tension, compression and gravity are recorded in moving porcelain in real-time.
Similar to a form of synesthesia, these data points are transmuted into a series of volumes. Rather than transforming a choreographer’s notes into an evening-length performance, imagine those notes, instead as color or sound. This haptic human/machine collaboration has yielded not just a new language whose syntax is formed by volumes of extruded human energy, but a new reflexive culture of the human experience.
We are creatures that take centuries to decide what technical advancements further humanity. All things digital are newborns compared to the distillation of human creativity that built our culture.
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