individual.troweprice.com/public/Retail/Planning-&-Research/Connections/3D-Printing/Printing-a-Medical-Revolution
A tad delayed. This is a fascinating article. I am not typically the science nerd, but this article discusses the ways in which 3D printing techniques can be used for new prosthetics and medical advances. Limbs can be made significantly and in different materials. 3D printing can also create covers for prosthetics that act as shields. While these advances aren’t exactly artistic, the article shows how technology that is useful in art can also be used quite functionally and productively in other fields as well.
For this project, I wanted to try to make a lot of positives because I only really learn things by doing them over and over and over again. I made two molds: one of a flu virus and one of a bottle of hand sanitizer. The flu mold thankfully succeeded while the other failed. I played with plaster and liquid plastic, and discovered the ways in which each settle differently. The plaster easily cracked and took longer to set, while the plastic burned and caked onto my hands for days and hardened quickly. My finished piece, which consists of a pile of silicone with painted flu viruses surrounding it, is a failure to me because my original vision does not shine through. However, I’m glad I went through the monotonous process of casting all the molds because I learned the new technique well. My piece is a commentary on our excessive attempts of defense against sickness but in the end they tend to overcome. And then we’re left with a pile of tissues, dry, crackly hands from overused sanitizer, and gross outfits to survive winter’s cold.
I had originally purely wanted to make an object that would originally not be able to float, to float. Although my final project did produce this outcome, I noticed that a different concept could be associated with this work. I decided to link this work to the idea of the shortage of clean water on earth. Upon doing more research i noticed that humans have polluted, diverted and allowed fresh water to be contaminated by seawater, along with the global warming dilemma melting the fresh water ice caps.
