Doing 3D PrintingAndré Bazin and the Images of Things

John Reid Perkins-BuzoAssistant Professor, Animation and Game Design

Southern Illinois University

What is 3D Printing?• An additive material process

• Starts with a 3D model (usually StereoLithography [STL] format)

• Lays down successive layers of a material, bonding each layer to earlier material

• Each layer contains a cross-section of the final object

• A wide variety of technologies are used A Bukhito Fused Deposition Modeling

(FDM) 3D printer built from a kit

Where does it fit?• 3D Plastic Art (Sculpture, Ceramics, Glass, etc.)

• Industrial Manufacture

• Architecture

• Artisanal Manufacture (Jewelry, Textiles)

• Photography and Cinema

What are we doing: 3D Printing?• Simply an extension of

what we do in 2D printing?

• Is the nature of the representation different in 3D printing?

• Is it representation at all? What represents what?

A way of binding the layers?

• Post-kehre Martin Heidegger

• André Bazin

• The Ontology of the Photographic Image (1945)

• Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation (1948)

• The early essay, especially, provides a way into understanding 3D printing as a human act

Bazin’s Realism• “The quarrel over realism in art stems

from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances” (Ontology, 12).

Bazin’s realism owes more to the tradition of Balzac, than the Académie de peinture et sculpture (Furst, 71).

Contemporary Appropriations• Ian Aitken in Realist Film Theory and

Cinema, distills Bazin’s realism into “five principal aspects” (RFTC 180-81)

• familiarity (recognizability) of the photographic image(s)

• a focus on totality within the image(s)

• an emphasis on indeterminacy within the image(s)

• a support for active spectatorship

• an empiricist theory of knowledge

Contemporary Appropriations• Lucia Nagib, in her book, World

Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, writes “[t]he uses of Bazin’s phenomenological realism seem indeed inexhaustible for both critics and practitioners, and it is not a coincidence that the filmmakers in focus here have made ample use, consciously or otherwise, of the Bazinian formula aimed at preserving the spatiotemporal integrity of the film event.” (26).

Bazin and 3D Printing• Bazin writes,

• “Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image” (Ontology 15-16).

• “[The] molding of death masks ... likewise involves a certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light.” (Ontology 12n).

Death mask of Blaise Pascal (1623-62)

Bazin and 3D Printing• Like the molding of a death mask, 3D

printing reaches beyond the photographic image

• It becomes more than a “shot”, and through active spectatorship, finds its place in a field of physical, rather than visual, meanings.

• The 3D print takes its place as a totality, a being, “existing before any meanings, the entire ...” volume of the 3D print “... manifesting a concrete density” (Cinematic Realism, 37).

Designer Mask: Emergenceby Lumecluster (Shapeways)

References• Aitken, Ian. Realist Film Theory and Cinema: The

Nineteenth-Century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

• Aitken, Ian. “Realism, Philosophy and the Documentary Film,” The Encyclopedia of the Documentary. London: Routledge, 2006. pp. 1097-1103.

• Anderson, Chris. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012.

• Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Cahiers du cinéma. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

• Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. vol1, pp. 9-16.

• Bazin, André. “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” What is Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. vol 2, 16-40.

• Bazin, André. Orson Welles, a critical view. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U, 1998.

• Furst, Lilian R. All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

• Lipson, Hod and Melba Kurman. Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2013

• Nagib, Lúcia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. Soho, Westminster: A&C Black, 2011.

• Nagib, Lúcia. “Filmmaking as the Prodcution of Reality: a Study of Hara and Kobayashi’s Documentaries” in Realism and the Audiovisual Media, ed. Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009.

• Risser, James. Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999.

• Verbruggen, Dries and Claire Warnier. Printing Things: Visions and Essentials for 3D Printing. Berlin: Gestalten Verlag, 2014.