I went to the Inside 3D Printing show at the Javits Center on Thursday. It was smaller than what I imagined and not as exciting as I had hoped. The show had a manufacturers space and a designers section. The manufacturers space was what you would expect - small booths with 3D printers, spools of filament and 3D prints. The booth that got the most attention on that side was Artec 3D's full body scanner, with a line of people waiting to get scanned. Even though I had seen this technology before, it was still interesting to see again. It is remarkable that you can get a realistic, and extremely detailed 3D print of yourself or someone you know. The first time I saw this, I imagined a home's mantel with a line of ancestral statues. I spoke with Moscovite Anna Galdina, pictured here with a 3D print of herself in her hand. She said they developed the technology in Russia but the country's business laws were too prohibitive to make it work so they picked up and moved to Palo Alto, California and have prospered ever since.
The design half of the show was also what one might expect - a hodgepodge of toys, fashion accessories, jewelry and other chotchkies, some white architectural models, and a few manufacturing design products. The oasis of this section was Ashley Zelinskie's 3D-printed Brillo box placed in an infinity room, lined with mirrors. While the Brillo box reference's Andy Warhol's recreation of the actual product with his silk-screening technique, Zelinskie adds a twist by creating a lattice-work using the hexadecimal code behind the file for the work. I like the nod to Warhol and the idea of a 3D file being infinitely reproducible, but the use of code as a physical structure is more interesting, and is fortunately behind much of Zelinskie's work.
If you visit Zelinskie's website (www.ashleyzelinskie.com) you will see an even more fitting, and one could say - digitally philosophical nod, to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chair.
Watch the Tech Times interview with Zelinskie below: