Assignment:

The first assignment was to build my personal website in witch I´ll post my activities regarding the FabAcademy course. Also in this first assignment it was expected for me to present my ideas regarding my final project.

Final Project

“To capture, on a tridimensional form, the movement that our eyes can´t see”.

This was my main purpose when I started with the idea of building an rotative structure for 3D scanning an object in motion. I´m not sure if this will be possible or achievable but I intend to work on a machine that would have a motor rotating base and a fixed support in which I could place a digital camera. The camera would be programmed to take a series of pictures of the moving object and later those images would be sent to a program called 123D Catch from Autodesk, so a 3D shape would be automatically generated.

My doubt is if the software will manage to create a 3D solid with at least three images provided. It´s not my aim to reach a shape that figures reality, what I look for is to obtain a shape that could translate a fraction of a moment of that moving object. I´m looking for this new way of looking into an object and seeing it translated as a tri-dimensional solid shape.

What gave me encourage to this initial idea for a final project, was my growing interest about the artistic movement called “Futurism” and other artistic movements that gained strength thanks to the arrival of the mechanicism in the field of Arts. So, the question that is behind this project proposal is: is it possible to translate movement into a tridimensional digital shape? And even more, is it possible to turn this digital motion image into solid shape, using the digital fabrication as a support?

I consider that my intentions may be high for the time being, but I really hope that by the end of this course I may reach somewhere near to this goal!

 Inspirations:
The inspiration to my final project came from different time periods and different areas. All of them have something in common: the attempt to capture movement and making it observable to our perception and visual attention.

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Etienne-Jules Marey (1830 – 1904)

Marey was a physiologist that developed photographic techniques in order to analyze the laws that governed the movements of the body, as comparing it to an animate machine. According to Dagognet, Marey was able to “capture a trace of the usually invisible world of motion, for aesthetics and science”.

Source: Dagognet, François. Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace.

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)

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Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, (1913)

Sculpture made by the Umberto Boccioni that depicts the movement of a human figure in motion. As a futurist sculpture, this piece is characterized by the movement attempt to portray speed, power, new machines and technologies conveying the dynamism of the modern industrial city.

WindCuts, (2007)

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From Miska Knapek, this artwork translated wind indicators (speed, temperature and direction) into a shape that was carved in wood with the help of a milling CNC machine. The artist programmed the wind measurements to translate them into a tridimensional shape that could be carved. As an opposition to my idea in this piece the goal was to translate an immaterial form rather than a material form into a digital shape. In other way I find similarities between my proposal and this artwork in what concerns the translation of motion. I can´t capture with my eyes the air motion due to its immateriality nor can I capture a fraction of moment of a moving object accelerated on a high speed.

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