Mapping Form:Dimensional Imaging and Ceramics

Mapping Form: Dimensional Imaging and Ceramics
Steve Thurston
The Studio Potter Volume 36. Number 2. Summer 2008. page 40-44.

I found this article in a journal in the library, it seems very relevant to my critical review as it speaks about digital technologies in relation to ceramics. Steve Thurston uses practice based research to explore his ideas.

Thurston begins by writing about Martin Heidegger' essay "The Thing" from Poetry, Language and Thought, written in 1950. Heidegger "had the foresight to question our modern relation with things and the process of making". He writes that although advances in travel and communication have brought places together, we are not closer to things. Thurston writes that advances in technology have have made us "reconsider the longevity and mobility of things", although he does not explain how.

"Our knowledge of making continues to evolve, and we are necessarily tied to its unending process. Modern technology permits us to make instruments and machines that challenge our traditional methodologies, spurring new theories and forms of knowledge. These new technologies will be transformed over time, leaving in their wake the history of our attempt to live with and understand their effects."

He explains that digital technology has changed how artists express themselves and communicate with each other and the world.

He uses the term Dimensional Imaging to describe three advanced digital technologies; 3D data acquisition (including 3D scanning), 3D form modelling and manipulation, and additive and subtractive processes such as rapid prototyping and CNC machines. He describes these as "indispensable tools that will extend and enhance an artist's ability to visualize, create, and communicate form." He also writes that Dimensional Imaging "adds another layer of significance to the rich history of the ceramic medium." This maybe a good way of describing the digital technologies used with ceramics for my critical review.

"When the technology is filtered through the human touch, a sense of pause and reflection is introduced - interjecting a consciousness into the linear realm of technology and enabling the process to gracefully meander and explore tangents as they arise."

This is a point I would like to expand upon in my critical review. They way I am using ceramics and digital technology it is 'filtered though the human touch' which I think is important to me.

Thurston explains that each of the three parts of Dimensional Imaging can interact with the others and therefore there are endless ways of designing and making form.

Steve Thurston's website.