Jul.10, 2013
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is a British/ Colombian artist exploring emerging technology and culture. He uses scanning, 3D printing and computational approaches to making artefacts, both physical and digital. In his previous work Digital Natives set, everyday items such as toys and detergent bottles are 3D scanned using a digital camera and then distorted and abstracted into new primordial forms.
Plummer-Fernandez's latest work the Venus of Google was generated using algorithmic image-comparison technique. The subject was 'found' when Plummer-Fernandez was googling a photograph via Google Image Search.
The Google search returned visually similar results, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment. I then used a similar algorithmic image-comparison technique to drive the automated design of a 3D printable object. The 'Hill-Climbing' algorithm starts with a plain box shape and tries thousands of random transformations and comparisons between the shape and the image, eventually mutating towards a form resembling the found image in both shape and colour.
Matthew has also used some other applications to help with the design. The 3D Mesh render and distortion is done with Processing and the Hemesh library. The image comparison is managed with a Python script calling a command-line tool called ImageMagick. The object was then printed on Z-Corp printer by Shapeways.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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