Precision and things going awry
Look at engineering publicity and you likely find the word precision somewhere. It’s what engineering is all about, precision, reliability, predictability. Of course art practice can thrive on those things also but artists regularly make use of the unpredictable and the mistake. That is not to say in the world of engineering precision that things can’t go awry.
Hethel does a lot of educational work and is currently in summer school mode, where school children and students are encouraged to explore contemporary engineering. Amongst other things they are using CAD and RP equipment. Due to some temporary and unexplained issue with one of the RP machines the result was not what was expected. I rather like this loopy sort of knitting, and the question is can it be reproduced or is a one off unique RP object? It could be scanned, made into a STL file and re-made but it wouldn’t have the same structural and layered properties.
