Meet Alison, researcher in Visual Arts, 3D explorer
By Emilie Walsh
Alison’s experimental film using Fusion 360
One of the exciting part of working for Research Platform services as a CAD and 3D printing ResCom*, is to get to meet researchers working with 3D in all disciplines. Alison Kennedy is currently a Master by Research candidate at the VCA, and has been coming to our trainings for a few months now.
Alison Kennedy, Self-portrait, 2018
What I find fascinating
with researchers in Visual Arts, is how they take ownership of a digital tools,
push the limits of the applications sand find creativity in the often
frustrating glitches and bugs
I’ve asked Alison to tell me about her use of CAD and 3D scanning in her research and art practices. It’s intriguing to see how engineering, archaeologists, designers, and artists use CAD in very different ways!
Emilie: Alison, tell us a bit about your art practice?
I am particularly interested in how art gives artists a platform for commenting on and taking a position in relation to things happening in the world. I think that art can provide a way of suggesting a response without being didactic. For me this is because art, once created, allows the viewer to complete the artwork through their own personal experience. This tension between what is intended by the creator and what actually occurs is a constant fascination to me. My use of technology arose out of this - I started creating a series of collages and digital paintings that used and were generated from collapse, breakdown and error. These glitches represents the slippage between intention and creation and the uncovering of personal truth. We are both furthest away and closest to ourselves.
“Untitled: Force of Reason” 2016 120cmx120cm digital painting/ collage limited edition giclee print.
My initial work in technology concentrated on digital painting and referred to romantic narrative paintings of the 18th century. I wanted to reconsider the human gesture - how embodied expression translated through the medium of the mouse, and stylus. I started to consider how texture and colour transformed completely through algorithmic extrapolation and started to use this quality in an intuitive way to express personal environmental concerns.
“Untitled” 2016 20x24 cm limited edition giclee print.
Emilie: How has 3D scanning and modelling have bring new direction to your work?
I became aware of the potential of 3d technology applications to express the body in a totally new and unusual way that I believe critiques our approach to other people and to the world. I am interested in taking existing applications, hacking into them and pushing them to the point of collapse - at this point I think that something new and quite profound occurs. Again, I work with technology intuitively and at this stage in my research I think that the constant creation and destruction inherent in the process highlights the relationship with the world in general.
Still from animation “Selfie” https://alison-kennedy-gdg8.squarespace.com/config/
In the work above, for example, I wanted to show how the artist in her studio can make a stand in relation to the world and I also wanted to suggest that at times the artist’s studio is a claustrophobic space. Personally, I love working in my studio so in a way this was quite a confronting idea for me. The figure ultimately breaks down through algorithim and is revealed as a series of surfaces - which is an idea I’m really interested in and working with in my research.
Still from an experiment in Fusion 360
At this stage I’m most interested in how 3d packages critique image and our image saturated society. The packages I was introduced to at Research Platforms at University of Melbourne connect engineering CAD and create surfaces and objects. Once again I am interested in how new approaches to these standardised applications expose how technology and our world interact.
If you are interested in learning to use CAD, 3D modelling, scanning or printing for your research, be in touch with us at Research Platform Services!
