Seattle-based artist Isobelle Ouzman creates 3D illustrations from discarded books found in dumpsters, recycling bins, and local thrift stores. She adopts these forgotten books as a way to give them a second life, cutting and pasting the books into layered fairy tale scenes instead of letting the novels collect dust or fall prey to the elements.
Ouzman creates her whimsical and monochromatic environments with an X-Acto knife, glue, watercolors and Micron pens. Each work focuses on plants and animals, several layers of winding forestry surrounding her central characters.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg (born 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an information artist and bio-hacker. She is most noted for her project Stranger Visions: a series of portraits created from DNA she recovered from discarded items, such as hair, cigarettes and chewing gum while living in Brooklyn, New York. She sequenced the DNA at the Brooklyn open biotechnology laboratory, Genspace. From the extracted DNA, she determined gender, ethnicity and other factors and then used face-generating software and a 3D printer to create a 3D portrait. While critical of technology and surveillance, some critics have found her work disturbing.
You probably haven’t heard much about 19-year-old Easton LaChappelle, though he’s already done enough to land a job at NASA. Simply put, LaChappelle is changing the world for the better.
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Easton taught himself robotics and combined open source designs with 3D printing to create a completely functional prosthetic arm. Even as Easton refines his designs, he’s using new and more powerful tools such as the HP Sprout to post his designs online for anyone to refine, repurpose, and use. He’s not just creating one thing, he’s giving everyone the ability to be their own engineer, to take what was once an involved, arcane process and make it one anyone can do. As tools such as the HP Sprout continue to proliferate, making 3D modeling and object scanning as simple as placing the object under a camera, we’ll continue to find new luminaries, and seeing how they redefine the world.
Joshua Harker was on a quest to find a medium that would make his surreal drawings into something tangible. By a process called automatism, he generated his first drawings called ‘Tangle’ in the 1980s and as the name suggests, the collection was far too complicated to be realized sculpturally. Fast forward 20 years later when 3d printing took the world by storm and gave Harker the perfect tool he needed to turn his drawings into the sculptures he intended them to be. Today, the artist and sculptor is considered to be a visionary and a pioneer in creating modern art using 3d printing technologies with different materials such as metals, plastics, and ceramics.
