Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Materialities

Culture Digitally, December 13, 2013

On a recent visit to Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, an exhibition about digital fabrication at New York’s Museum of Art and Design, I was struck by the ways in which these new tools had replaced traditional materials and processes on the small, white rectangular museum labels. More specifically, in this exhibition, digital fabrication tools such as 3D printing, CNC (computer-numerically-controlled) machining, laser cutting, and digital knitting and weaving—and, more importantly, complex combinations of these tools—took the place of traditional art and design methods such as painting, etching, collage and sculpture. According to the show’s curator Ron Labaco, “In the world of art and design, discourse is not longer preoccupied with the technology in and of itself. Rather, interest lies in how technology may be creatively applied in the interplay between digital and analog, natural and man-made, biological and cultural, virtual and real.”