New technologies for 3D realization in Art and Design practice

As digital design technologies become ever more widespread, CAD-CAM, virtual and rapid prototyping techniques are increasingly being exploited by creative practitioners working in areas outside the industrial design and engineering contexts in which these technologies are currently predominantly employed. This review paper aims to critically examine work by artists, craft practitioners, and designer-makers who creatively engage with these new and rapidly emerging technologies and, by doing so, extend their own practice and push at the boundaries of art and design disciplines. Historic precedents for new 3D technologies in the fine and applied arts are identified, and writing by Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Virilio informs the critical review of work by art and design practitioners in sculpture, metalwork, jewellery, and ceramics. The discussion reflects on relationships between art and technology and physical and virtual making, and concludes by pointing to the possibility of new “hybrid” forms of practice which bridge the gap between physical and virtual design worlds. The paper closes by suggesting that the notion of “truth to materials” in the arts and crafts might now be extended to one of “truth to virtual materials”, as practitioners creatively negotiate relationships between digital cause and physical effect

The world in ruins : Heidegger, Poussin, Kiefer

The aim of this paper is to begin to respond to the question of how to engage the presence of catastrophic climate change as a locus of philosophical thought. What has to be thought is the end of the world. Central to that project is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in particular, Heidegger’s thinking of the earth/world relation, both in itself and in terms of the limits it encounters. Heidegger’s use of “examples” of artwork, as well as works by Nicolas Poussin and Anselm Kiefer, are deployed in order to begin to understand the role of art in thinking the end of the world

Review essay. Anger and Time : a critical assessment

Published only recently, and after the three seminal volumes of Spheres, Zorn und Zeit (Anger and Time) is a book that is as compelling and thought provoking as it is elegantly written. It is also timely in the way that philosophy aspires to be, that is, not by analysing the present according to its chain of events, but from a distance and at an angle that seems originally strange, if not altogether arbitrary, yet progressively reveals their full critical potential. Still, Anger and Time raises a number of questions and problems, some of which I will formulate in what follows, after having presented what I take to be the main thesis and contribution of the book