Sculpture Enhancement Proposal

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting -- Ad Reinhardt

I think sculptors can do better than that in the 21st century, if they allow the viewers to participate, and control the sculpture with their iPhone/smart devices.

I aspire to create a sculpture that viewers can either move with their iPhones, or view in Augmented Reality with their iPhones -- or both!

MOVING SCULPTURE WITH iPHONE

PROTOTYPE 1:  We managed to move our Styrofoam sculpture around in Phoenix at the SouthWest Makerfest in 2014.  The Intel rep was controlling a Roomba with an Android tablet, and we just taped our Styrofoam sculpture on top (CNC milled at Metalphysic of Tucson).

Controlling the sculpture with a smart phone

PROTOTYPE 2: Previously at the Tucson Sculpture Festival 2013, we allowed visitors to move a Lazy Susan around with a smart phone, to view an Augmented Reality skull in 360 degrees.  

A smaller 3D printed version of that skull sat next to the "target," so that the viewers could see both a real skull sculpture, and an augmented skull sculpture, spin around next to each other.

Smart phone controlled

augmented reality

In this case, the interface was just a web page.  And the smart phone, connected to the WiFi, just went to this webpage to move the Lazy Susan.  I suppose that someone could have also moved the Lazy Susan remotely this way.

CURRENT PROJECT: I would like to "enhance" our current Styrofoam sculpture collaboration, which Daniel Hornung created in Zbrush, based on one of my drawings.

Finished Styrofoam sculpture,

painted at Metalphysic

YouTube video 

chronicling the first half

of this collaborative sculpture project

I would love to allow viewers to move individual parts of this sculpture around with their iPhones.  However, I think that would call for a whole new expensive redesign of this project.  

So I'm imagining something simpler using just spot lights.  Perhaps we could fabricate a ring of spot lights around the base of the sculpture. By turning the spot lights on and off, we could deliver radically different visual moods of the same sculpture. If visitors could control the lights with their smart phones, they could experience radically different visual interpretations.

FANTASY: Drifting into fantasy, I'm imagining a viewer approaching the sculpture, and an iBeacon buzzing their phone, inviting the visitor to change and play with the sculpture lighting.  Using Blue Tooth would remove the burden of supplying WiFi.  Then there is the problem when two, or more, people want to control the lighting at the same time.

Imagine the disaster of two people

trying to control Chris Ristra's

"Hand of Man"

at the same time

SCULPTURE IN AUGMENTED REALITY

David at Augment El Paso, said that one could use a 3D STL file as an augmented reality "target."

He has done 2D augmented reality for us, using some of the serigraphs we made for the Desert Triangle Print Carpeta as "targets."

Augmented Reality

with 2D "targets"

I think this would be difficult to work in 3D augmented reality, and don't expect it to be done.  For one, the app might take up too much space on people's iPhones to entice them to download it.  However it would be neat walking around the sculpture and seeing new augmented elements in and around the sculpture -- even 3D augmented elements.

And I can even imagine moving part of the sculpture with the iPhone, and having different augmented elements emerge.  However a project like that would probably take a lot of expertise and be super expensive.

CONCLUSION

In the 21st Century everyone is looking at the world through the lens of their iPhones.  If artists could entice the public to employ their iPhones, they might look at the sculptures -- inside of backing into them when looking at a painting.  

Luis Jimenez was a genius for putting color into his sculptures, and forcing the public to look at them.

Colorful Luis Jimenez sculpture

in front of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

I think these digital enhancements could promote the development of sculpture.  Traditional sculptures of kings on and off horses, work with more mass than space.  Modern sculptures, like those of Henry Moore, tend to have more space than mass.  And contemporary sculptures have the potential to actually change and manipulate space, by the whims of the viewer.

In Henry Moore's sculptures,

the voids are often as important

as the mass

Reaching for stranger ideas:

Who knows, maybe the iPhone could control little robots around the sculpture, like this Robot Origami from MIT.  Why not control it's movement with an iPhone, as the magnetic field controls what it does.

Origami Robot