Masters of Creative Technologies Blog

Post-anthropocentrism is one of the three core thought pillars that make up philosophical posthumanism. It is the idea that in traditional humanism we see humans as above the other and centric to the world. The other in this case being anything that is not defined as “anthropos” (human). Adding the “post-” means to move past and move beyond that thinking. If I am to explore posthumanism in my art, it would all be defeated if I was to just use my own blood. Fortunately; I have used pigs blood so far as my primary expression. However, that is also discounting the other vasular fluids of beings such as plant sap.

There is this plant called “Draceaena Draco” or the dragon tree which has crimson red sap used commonly in medicine. When cut it looks like the tree is bleeding.

Image retrieved from here.

I tried to get my hands on one of these plants to have a look at the sap, however they can be quite expensive and I don’t have the budget for that. However, Kelz and I were out the other weekend and I saw what I think is one of these trees just up the road.

I’m no horticulture expert, but these plants look very similar, they have the same leaves as its cousins and there are parts of the bark which run this crimson red color; there is a small sample that I took just by running my finger along it.

I have put in an application for a materials scholarship and if that goes through, then hopefully I will be able to afford one of these plants to experiment with, drying the sap, looking at the textures it goes and comparing that with blood.

The electron microscope is a fascinating piece of tech that I’ve had the opportunity to not only work with but also operate. Last time I was operating it I analyzed some cotton fibers with dried pigs blood as well as some crazed acrylic squares. This time I took a small cutting of my silk + pigs blood experiment.

Above is the sample coated in platinum before examination. I put the sample into the machine and began to explore. 

Something unexpected happened during this examination - movement. My intrinsic belief is that when something is coated in a metal such as platinum; it is frozen in place, however that was proven not to be the case. I asked the researcher there who let me operate the machine, but she had no idea about why this might be happening. My thinking is that these strands of silk are so fine that the energy or vibration from the machine is causing them to curl or snap - but that is just a guess of mine.

The sample was prepared on August 12th during my first experiments with blood.

The full album is posted here on imgur.

I am writing this post a month after these examinations have taken place as there have been a few developments with these images, samples and thought processes.

I printed out a few of my favourite prints and stuck them up on the wall in the postgrad space behing my computer to think about what I could do with the images, how I could present, etc. I also repeated this process with the physical glitched scans of my last post.

The images printed in the postgrad space

I also started to experiment with methods of presentation, I made a small rudimentary mock up of a potential mode of presentation, which I regrettably did not photograph. This however involved a magnifying glass attached to a wall with the three electron microscope samples behind it on a clear acrylic stand.

I showed Frances this before I left for the night, hoping to return in the morning, take photos and reflect. However, as we all know, life doesn’t like to follow what you plan for it to do.

In the morning my installation had fallen off the wall since the tape had come loose, this wouldn’t be such a huge issue if it wasn’t for the fact that the silk and blood sample was nowhere to be seen. We all look around, which is when I noticed the floors were swept and the cleaners coming in. It seems that the sample had taken a trip to the rubbish, never to return.

This, I wont lie is extremely disheartening - this was the first sample that I explored autonomously, gotten stunning, useful- images from; but that’s all lost without the context of the object behind it. Everyone has seen electron microscope images before, but not usually with the sample itself.

It’s no surprise that I like glitches; it’s been part of my ‘brand’ aesthetic since I was in second year, I create glitch art and a large aspect of my research (hacking) can be explained as glitching. Therefore, it seems only natural that through my experiments, I’ll come across some glitching.

I created a series of artefacts a few weeks ago on some acrylic slides when I had the thought “Is there a way that I can accelerate the drying process of blood?” I had some isopropyl alcohol around my workshop for sterilising tools and some of my SEM slides, so I got to experimenting.

I tried mixing blood with isopropyl alcohol and methylated spirits in two ways. First, painting blood and then applying the chemical and the second way being the reverse.

I got some fascinating results. Below are my results:

Isopropyl:

When applied first, spreads blood thinly over painted area

When applied last, scatters blood but leaves deeper areas, which is not possible with other method

Dries fast and doesn’t form cracks like sun-drying does

Methylated spirits:

When applied first, blood clumps on brush and ‘burns’, making it hard to paint.

When applied second, scatters blood into small clumps where they slowly ‘burn’ and turn a dark red.

Meths dry before blood, meaning that cracking texture is still somewhat possible.

With this, I went to my scanner and tried as many different techniques as I could in either 600 or 1200 dpi. I found that while the scan was in progress, I could open the scan bed which would cause the image to desaturate, changing the background colour to silver instead of white, I also noticed that only the highest peaks of the surface would colour, which is hard to see on a screen, but when printed, is obvious.

I also found that if I pushed the slides while the scan was in progress, I could create some great temporal artefacts, showcasing the motion and texture in a different way.

Full album:

https://imgur.com/a/zVPBiDB

After last week's pretty dissapointing donation, I've been trying to think of what I can do with the artefacts that I have from it. I have a few things to work with:

The scans (fingers + bandadge)

Finger prick sample

Audio recordings

I've downloaded and installed Sapling on my iMac at uni to do some exploration and testing with the audio recordings. I got some pretty interesting results, especially after just letting the program run autonomously for a minute.

I’ve learnt a few things doing this short exercise, the main point being that there is value in everything that I have produced, even if I don’t see it right now - these recordings while by themselves are very monotonous and don’t sound like much, there are hidden sounds; much like how I am trying to unpack and discover the hidden narratives in blood through my art practice.

I still need to contemplate whether I continue with the same donation site or not, because if I do, I might not be able to do any more recordings. It’s hard to say now and that decision demands it’s own blog post, but that aside - let’s talk audio.

I had my second donation today.

It was not all I hoped it to be, if I’m honest. This experience overall was quite negative. That being said, I did some experiments and not all experiments can go well - that’s why they’re experiments.

After my donation I wrote my reflection:

The facility has changed. It’s new. Updated and shiny, seemingly more surgical - it is somewhat unwelcoming. Asking for the recordings, which seemed to me so marmalade felt like this monumental task, multiple people involved and an email of the final recordings required. It’s what I wanted to avoid, the whole reason I’m not going through ethics in the first place. When I came into the donation center I was excited. The possibility of using the blood tubes as artifacts and ephemera propelled me, but now it seems like even if I want to get something as simple as a surface audio recording required all of these people and permissions - getting ANYTHING else would be impossible. 

This facility is so large and so maliciously orchestrated i feel like a wrench in the system, which makes me feel both excited and guilty. 2:30 I think is the wrong time for these donations. The morning felt more natural and easy going. If I change facility to a smaller, more relaxed one - does that defeat the concept and imagery of me travelling to the sacrificial altar? If so I might just have to deal with that and accept that I might not be able to use the tubes and ephemera as I want to. 

I’ve counted 5 others go up to donate in my 8 minutes sitting here. Miley Circus plays on 3 TV’s around the floor. The nurses bustle around as I sit facing people travelling back and forward with papers in hand, bags of blood and empty vials in tow. This is a strange place. An ancient and primal force such as blood letting giving way to the modern. 

Even though this experience has left me feeling defeated, guilty and strange about myself and my ideas - I have learnt something useful. Being around my own ideas and people who understand my concept, it’s hard to step back and look at it from the outside - today was a bit of a reality check for me.

However, as I do - I continued doing experiments when I got home.

Here is the audio recording of today’s donation

With my two material samples, our group headed to the electron microscope in WS. Some of our class mates forgot their samples or were too large, so I was lucky enough to get two samples into the machine. As expected, the blood + crazing sample was too large to fit in the scanner; however the technician did say that I was able to use the ‘dried’ blood as she had never tried it before. Very exciting. The second sample was the small crazed acrylic square.

Our materiality making group waiting outside the SEM

Stefan encouraging me to look directly at the “DANGER HIGH POWER LASER” sign

Our samples then needed to be prepared, which involved coating them in platinum through a gas chamber. This was the original colour of the gas.

What I found most facinating about this process is not the color of the gas, the sound it made or even the spectacle of watching this sci-fi level tech - but it was the material samples AFTER they went through this process.

To see the blood (left front), acrylic (centre), obsidian (back left), coarse wool (centre back), treated wool (right) and the sad (right front) all coated in platinum really changed these materials, not just in look but also meaning. The wool now couldn’t be used in a garment (although that would be interesting), the acrylic was no longer opaque and the blood hardly visible.

We then went to the machine itself and started looking around to see what we could find.

The electron microscope itself

We then had a look around, the first sample to look at was the small sample fo blood. I expected to see some red blood cells, maybe slightly deformed due to the aggressive drying process, but I certainly didn’t expect to see what we did. What we saw were these small spherical objects next to large clusters of dried mass. The technician wasn’t sure what the spheres were - her best guess was pollen.

The acrylic was the last object we looked at under the scope and the technician actually allowed me to operate the machine!

In this photo you can see me looking at the edge of one of the acrylic cracks and adjusting the settings such as focal distance, brightness and contrast. Here are the results from that scan.

I learnt a lot from this exercise. Not just about the physical material of the surfaces, but what stories they tell close up. In the last image, this huge gash in the surface is actually 1/3 the width of a human hair. Those craters are formed from it dissolving in the ethylacetate. I think these images are incredible, not just because they look dramatic, but because they can convey a huge variety of stories across one sample smaller than 5mm across.

Last Thursday we had the opportunity to go to the electron microscope, take some samples and see what we could find out about our materials.This was a fascinating experience and while short-lived, taught me a lot about my materials and maybe where to go from here. I started this process with some knowledge about what is required from the SEM - a sample that is properly dried in a bath of ethanol 70-100% over the course of a few hours. This meant that I needed to first try locate some ethanol, which is very hard to find (because it can be used to make dangerous/illegal substances). This is also where I discovered the phenomenon of crazing; an effect that causes cracks to appear when heat-treated acrylic is exposed to alcohol.

I went to the applied science department alongside Frances to try and see if I could sneak in to one of their free labs and do some tests - I got put in contact with Iana, a lab technician. She asked me what I needed and was more than happy to help find out what made acrylic crack or dissolve. As a chemical scientist, she knew WAY more about any of this than me, so I asked what she thought I could do.

I ended up doing experiments with:

Ethanol (99%)

Hexane

Acetic Acid

Dichloromethane

Chloroform

Acetone

Ethylacetate

Surprisingly, the Ethanol had no effect! This may be because the acrylic was extruded rather than heat treated? I’m stumped on that because laser cutting should mean that the edges are heat treated. Either way, I got some very interesting results.

Ethanol (99%)

No effect

Hexane

Light surface dissolving, but no visible effect

Acetic Acid

Small crazing on edges

Dichloromethane

Frosting and melting, leaving a “foot” of plastic

Chloroform

Melting and sticking to paper towel when dried

Acetone

Heavy frosting, Light crazing

Ethylacetate

Heavy crazing

I don’t have any up-close photos of the crazing (Lenses aren’t good enough to focus) on the Ethylacetate sample, but you can see it in the above photo. This was exciting as I finally was able to see some crazing. Being the active ingredient in nail polish remover, Iana said that it’s not dangerous and relatively easy to come by. I then took this sample back home to do some further testing and experimentation on. I wanted to see what blood would look like on the piece, so I put my previous investigation findings to use and painted some blood onto the acrylic and dried it gently with a heat gun to avoid burning.

I had a meeting with my supervisors on Tuesday, going over the ethics application, their thoughts on it and some areas that I struggled with in the initial draft. According to our original timeline, the ethics application is due next week Wednesday. I sent off my draft to Adam a few weeks ago to have a look over, but have not heard from him, which if I’m honest has left me a bit lost. I don’t know exactly what to say, all I can do is be honest, present my research and hope for the best? I bought up the concerns with having the phlebotomist get blood samples for me to use as I have not fully talked with their company, gotten their permission, etc, etc. I threw the idea of using diabetic finger pricks to obtain my samples (1-5ml of blood from each prick) and Frances suggested that I use that as my method of collection since it is safe, autonomous and regulated without having an external person or company - so back to my ethics form and changing it for the 5340th time.

They really weren’t kidding when they said ethics takes a few months!

One important concept that came out of that meeting was if I am using the diabetic finger pricks as my method of collection; I realistically would get a lot less blood than if I went through a phlebotomist. I would also need to be wary of how many times I pricked myself, too often it would damage my fingers (even though people do this everyday in some cases) and too little would mean that I wouldn’t potentially have enough.

Therefore I’ve gone back to thinking about rituals and ritualistic sacrifice.

I am considering this notion in my thesis already; when I talk about my tri-monthly blood donations, I am undertaking a ritual and sacrificing my own material to appease a higher purpose. If I abstract the idea of a god and what that means (an abstract figure of authority who is all powerful), I can draw parallels between that definition and my thesis examiner. Therefore, my donations and the artefacts that come from them can be considered sacrifices to appease them (and get a desired outcome which is a degree).

In a talk by Dr Ferrando she states under her section of “The new all knowing God” - “I do not know, but the internet does” or “I know, but the internet knows more” (Ferrando, 2018). I can abstract this Mantra and relate it to my examiner, therefore seeing my examiner as a god. If we take the idea of a god being all encompassing and judging, I can argue that my thesis and everything that goes into it (my digital waste ritual being a perfect example of this) has been my entire world for the past 12 months, therefore to me; this examiner is retroactively judging me and being all encompassing (even now as I write this knowing it will be judged in the future).

Gods aside; another interesting topic that has come from this discussion on Tuesday was the critical thought on scale of installation. Since I want to create silk, blood and resin lithographs; each of these materials are precious and expensive/finite. This has got me thinking about how big I can realistically make these artefacts and the impact that they have on those viewing the piece. I have a budget of pretty much $1000 from course-related costs; that sounds like a lot, but when you consider that silk is $74/m and epoxy resin is ~$60/L, this adds up FAST, also not taking into account manufacturing of the lithographs. This, along with what Clint said has gotten me thinking of Micro installations.

Rice Mapping, Drill Tokyo, 2015

This idea on installations on a small scale has fascinated me when I first saw the project Rice Mapping (Drill Tokyo et all, 2015) where a team projected a film sequence onto a single grain of rice, a very impressive feat. The installation was to demonstrate the precision of Madmapper, a projection mapping program that i’ve used in the past for projects (making the Popup globe bleed). However, what I like about this installation is the presentation. There is a magnifying glass showing the viewers what’s happening on the grain - rather than showing a video of it. This way the audience must get close and personal to see what’s happening, in real time.

Collecting myself, Powers, 2013

This installation reminds me a lot of my project, in the fact that these individual items are not that impressive or important, but together they form an assemblage, a completed machine. When assembled, these pieces form a bricolage that tells the story of the artist through their hair. In this small snapshot above you can see how much their life has changed every time they washed their hair, the colours, the size and the roughness all tell a story individually but as a whole, a larger narrative. 

Portraits: An Exhibition in Tif Sigfrids’ Ear, Sola, 2013

The above installation is a series of micro paintings that are housed in a gallery worn by the gallery’s owner - Tif Sigfrid. During the hours of the installation, she wears this piece in her ear while the remainder of the gallery is blank. While I don’t plan to make installations this small - I do like the aspect of having a person BE the installation. This is reminiscent of “Until I die” (Morozov, 2016) where the artist becomes part of the installation at the apex of the experience, not just experiencing it himself for the first time, but adding to it.

These are some interesting points to go off and I think that I’ll consider smaller scale installations more going forward, I could create a series of smaller lithophanes instead of one big one?

We’ll see I guess.

References:

Ferrano, F. 2018. Are we becomign God(s)? - The posthuman Divine (Part 1). Video retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2o1cVI3Jz0

Powers, A. 2013. Collecting Myself [my history, my future]. The Hall, Loveland, Colorado.

Drill Tokyo, Aircord, Maxill & Yuki Precision. 2015. Rice Mapping. Milan, Italy.

Sola, J. 2013. Portraits: An Exhibition in Tif Sigfrids’ Ear. Tif Sigfrid, Hollywood, CA

With creating a thesis around a material and investigating the material to uncover it’s hidden accounts and meanings relating to one’s philosophical beliefs, you need to get your hands a bit dirty - or in this case, bloody.

My last material investigations revealed some fascinating conclusions with silk and how blood is absorbed by silk, how it dries on silk and the eventual colour(s) that the final artefact has. Seeing how the blood dried along the edges of the silk reminded me of Jordan Eagles, how he looks into the physical properties of blood and exposes them. I realised that while this is not the end goal for me, it is a step that I must take in order to achieve my purpose. Eagles does not talk much about his material process, but from watching some of his interviews and some of my own research conclusions about resin + organic material, I have pieced together a possible method. I have carried it through and this blog post is the reflection on action of my experiments.

Frances has kindly set up a session at the electron microscope at the end of this month for our materiality postgraduate group. This is exciting as using the electron microscope to analyse blood has been on my wish list since starting this process. However, there are a few things I need to do first - prepare samples. This fits in well with what I have already been planning to do such as drying blood on perspex slides.

In order to follow the specifications for the machine, non-conductive materials need to follow these specifications:

<12mm in diameter

<5mm thick

Biological samples require a proper dehydrating and drying process

Before I go testing this, I need to prepare some slides to put into the scope. Normal microscope slides are too big and since we only have a limited time, I need to be wary of others that may want to use the scanner in the same slot we’ve booked.

I’m choosing acrylic as my slide as it is clear, easy to work with and able to be shaped (laser cutting). I’m plan to initially test a few options and bring along the best result - there’s no sense in banking on one material sample only to find out I can’t use it. My current plan is to create some ‘beds’ that the blood can be poured into and dried in. This way; when the material dried it will sit neatly in the bed and have a border rather than just a hunk of acrylic with one side painted in dried blood. When laser cutting 3mm acrylic (what I am planning to use) you can expect that an engraving cut will remove ~0.2mm of material (Blashki, 2015), which is perfect if I’m trying to create this bed for my blood sample to dry in.

I started modelling some examples:

[rendered images, fusion screenshot, dimensions]

Bloodbeds v1.0:

Bloodbeds 1.0 (12mm x 12mm x 3mm). -1.5mm, -1mm & -0.5mm edge offset

Bloodbeds v1.1:

Bloodbeds 1.1 (2mm x 2mm x 3mm). -0.1mm, -0.2mm & -0.3mm edge offset

Bloodbeds v1.2:

Bloodbeds 1.2 (5mm x 5mm x 3mm). -0.1mm, -0.2mm & -0.3mm edge offset

I started with 12x12mm when I saw the initial dimensions of the electron microscope bed, but neglected to think about the other samples that might be present at the same time. This sample would take up the entire space, making the whole session just about my samples - while I might make some 12x12mm samples, these would be for other macro material investigations, not the electron microscope. I then thought about making my sample 1/6th of the bed, since that gives a fair chance to the others using the space, however 2mm is incredibly small and might be impossible to work with (I will explain later). For this reason I chose 5x5mm as it is <1/2 of the surface area, still gives a chance for the other students to use the machine and will be more feasible to work with.

Over the weekend I ordered some small modelling magnets for a side project I am working on; these were 5mm x 2mm - coincidentally around the same size as these designed beds.

This is one of the magnets held in my fingertip. This is small enough to work with already, let alone less than half the size as was the case with v1.1. 

However, these designs were done before I knew what a “proper dehydration and drying procedure” actually meant.

Going through bct, I never had an interest in textiles, I viewed them as materials to work with to build not materials to be explored.  This left me looking at acrylic, plexiglas, fiberglass, silks, wood and metal to build my designs and/or installations, not really thinking about the materials individually and what narratives they held by themselves. This mindset has changed since starting mct. I now am fascinated by how textiles react to each other, with space, technology and especially blood. Blood is undeniably the driving force behind this excitement and exploration. When I knew that I wanted to explore the hidden narratives and accounts within the evolving materiality of blood, it’s relation to evolving digital data and manifesting those explorations together - textiles are an undeniable part of this exploration.

My practice of manifesting my digital waste each month onto large-scale silks has helped this exploration and really guided my thinking forward; a thought process and pattern that would not have occurred without the post-materiality postgraduate group. With what I’m looking into now (silks, resin, blood and lithophanes), it is important to research and explore what other textitle artists and researchers have done in the past. I’ve explored Jordan Eagles and his works Shards (2018) and The Blood Mirror Project (2014-2016). His work with blood has had a direct influence on my thinking of art practice and the specific material I’m looking at - blood. I had a conversation with Frances and Clint yesterday about my ethics application and Frances mentioned a textile artist Eva Hesse. Specifically her work ‘Contingent’.

Contingent by Eva Hesse 1969.

In this work Hesse explores cheesecloth, latex and fiberglass. The soft and malleable cheesecloth is painted with latex and suspended between fiberglass - giving these pieces each a distinct dichotomy of form. The works exist now as a hanging installation, along with a few of her other works which I am fascinated by such as “Right After” (1969) and “Aught” (1968).

Right After, 1969 [left] & Aught, 1968 [right]

With both of these installations Eva explores a multitude of materials such as fiberglass, polyester resin, wire, canvas, latex, rope, polyethylene sheeting and metal. While these works are stunning hung up, the most interesting thing to me is the self-awareness that Hesse had when creating these installations. 

My experiments on the 12th led me to thinking about blood and silk with a short dive into Lithophanes. 3D models that when held to the light expose an image due to the pass-through of light. The thicker the extrusion, the darker the color will be on the lithograph. I used the same online tool I used last time to create two new lithophanes to compare. I can imagine how this program works, take the image’s luminescence values and apply that to the thickness of the model. Determine the minimum thickness (0.6mm) and the maximum (3mm) and then map them to 0 (black) and 255 (white), then add the modeled frame. I wouldn’t know how to code this, but with this tool thankfully I don’t need to.

If I plan to use these lithophanes as molds for the silk + blood, then I would need to approach this as either 1 of 2 ways:

1: Print lithophane, made negative mold, cast silk + blood in resin

2: Print negative lithophane, use this as mold to cast silk + blood in resin

Since I presume the tool works with luminescence values, I de-saturated scan 002 and also made a negative of it.

De-saturated 002 and negative 002 side by side.

These were then the images I used to create the following lithophanes using the online tool.

De-saturated 002 lithophane

Close up texture of de-saturated 002 lithophane

Inverted 002 Lithophane

Close up texture of inverted 002 lithophane

Throughout my time in lock down I've made somewhat of a transition in my thinking, at least a transition towards making a final artifact to embody my practice of becoming posthuman. Through this exploration and experimentation I’ve come up with the idea of making a lithophane as a final embodied work. This lithophane would be made from silk, blood and resin in it’s physical form, but the actual lithophane picture will be dictated by my digital material interrogation and investigations, thus bringing the evolved digital and physical material together in one final evolution.

Resin is interesting in itself, it captures and holds objects in place and time. I’ve been doing a small amount of exploration into resin casting, especially with perishables such as candy, fruit and flowers - along this same extension, blood would be considered a perishable in theory, although I will need to experiment further. A blog called “resin obsession” talks here about putting candy in resin and their observations on the candy spoiling after 11 months. ERgun and Lietha (2010) discuss that the shelf life on confectionery are largely dependant on the moisture content of the food, hard candied typically last longer than fudges, marshmallows and gums. This makes sense and I presume is why people typically dehydrate fruit, flowers and animals before casting them in resin - to make sure that a minimal (if not, none) amount of bacteria and fungus can grow inside the resin, causing decomposition. 

A screenshot taken from Sheri  Vegas’ video on flower decomp in resin 

Sheri Vegas talks in one of her videos about the decomposition of fresh flowers in resin, which she is showcasing in the above screenshot. She walks us through one of her explorations and says that the flowers started to rot after about three days and completely so by the fifth. This seems to ring true across the board (for flowers) and others have tried similar experiments with food.

This video showcases a series of food items being placed in resin and documented after 2 months. This video showcases a clock made from candy 5 years after the making of it. Here, Nick Zammeti documents his experiments with ketchup and resin where you can clearly see the decomposition of ketchup in the resin. 

Since Auckland has gone back to level 3 Lock down, which subsequently means no classes, I took that opportunity to do a full day of experimenting (when it usually would’ve been studio). This was a much needed exercise as I have been starting to feel that I have fallen behind a little in terms of my actual thesis discussion. I re watched some posthumanist politics videos, did some experimenting with 3D forms (my previous post) and from the last idea I had in that post (blood + resin lithographs) I decided to try and make some headway in that.

Do some material investigations into blood and charmeuse silk.

Thankfully I had some spare silk (un-printed, but steamed) from my failed digital trash prints. I cut some spare fabric off and got to work.

This post on reddit got me thinking about 3D printed lithoscopes and how I can explore my thoughts and explorations into making my sound and image experiments so far into 3D forms. These incredible 3D printed designs look very unassuming and bland on first glance but when held in front of a light, the level of detail is surprising and changes the object entirely

I tried a tool online I found and created two lithoscopes. There are a lot of settings and I don’t fully understand them just yet, but I can give them a go and see after I get these first ones printed.

Scan A from my previous experiments as a lithoscope. The first image showcasing the entire object as it is created in the frame and the second showing the 3D texture of the blood and outline of the bandage. I’m surprised by the level of detail achieved, might not be the same in print; but that’s to be discovered.

Scan 002 from my previous experiments as a lithoscope. The first image again, showcasing the entire object. The second showcasing the detail.

The exploded texture of 002

Before finding this tangent (literally this morning) I attempted to create a 3D model using Fusion360 since Rhino (and therefore grasshopper) is not working on my PC at home. I imported scan A1 into fusion as a canvas and began tracing the image onto a sketch using the spline tool. This yielded an...interesting result.

It looks almost like a virus (topical).

From there I tried my hand a few of different operations that Fusion can do with sketch profiles: Extruding and revolving. I couldn’t explore sweeping or lofting (actually now that I think about it a loft between scan A1 and B1 could be quite interesting) as the sketch was too complex and collided with itself.

Straight extrusion and revolve of spline sketch of scan A1

Scan A1 cut into a block to potentially fill with resin

I really like how the lithoscopes turned out and the whole concept really interests me. This got me thinking about a potential avenue to explore later on (After level 3 is over and whenever we can get back to campus).

I’m looking at using blood, silk, resin (physical material) as well as scans, sound and 3D models (digital material). I’ve wanted a way to connect these two since first talking about this thesis topic, as it’s bringing the evolved material back together. Here’s a potential method I’ve thought of to create a final artefact:

Scan the blood (from donation), turn scan into sound, turn sound into lithoscope

Print lithoscope in large scale

Soak silk in blood (the same blood from said donation)

Lay silk on top of printed lithoscope

Resin cast the silk to preserve the texture of the lithoscope