The Printers Dance

The Printers Dance

Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco (primary venue), Distrito 350 and Taller Nodo (secondary venues), Guadalajara.

September 13 – 28, 2024.

An ongoing collaboration with Zebulon Zang.

The Printers Dance began with the repurposing of old 3D printers that have been replaced by newer, more efficient models. Experimentation led to looking at the various ways that the moving parts of the printers (the print bed, the hot end) could be joined together to push, pull, and shake the other printers creating a series of movements that allowed the action of printing to become a dance between two machines. The printers were then put on wheels for increased mobility and the groupings expanded from pairs to groups of up to twenty-four.

This work emerged from a series of logistical questions addressing how the act of creating a 3D print could be transformed into a mechanical ballet of repetition and reproduction. However, the project’ also engages with several historical antecedents, to artworks that have focused on the relationship between the organic and the mechanical, on how methods of reproduction connect these two worlds, and the glitches or breakdowns in these connections.

One key inspiration is Norman McLaren’s film Pas De Deux (1968) which features two dancers performing a traditional ballet duet. The film uses a chronophotographic technique (descended from Étienne-Jules Marey) to imprint the movements of dancers as multiple selves expanding across the screen. In this way, the very organic and human nature of the ballet is broken down into discrete moments of mechanical action. This division of movement into a series of discrete images is similar to the logic of the 3D printer which “slices” objects into layers in order to overlay them into a final whole. Where McLaren used photography to mechanize the human body, The Printers Dance goes in the opposite direction, using the movements of mechanical reproduction in an attempt to mimic the natural flows of dancers.

3D printers are, of course, not meant to be performers. They are objects of production and labor. These specific printers have largely lost relevance due to the increased capacities of  newer machines. More generally, 3D printing itself, once proposed as replacement for skilled workers in large scale factories, has instead become a niche technique in creative reproduction. Though the machines have been deemed inefficient in serving their original purpose, here they are revived, tasked with taking on anthropomorphic movements of a dance.

In the abstract, these machines should be able to recreate all dances with the perfection and precision that dancers work for years to achieve. However, as any person who has worked with 3D printing well knows, perfect reproducibility is at best a rare occurrence. Various external factors and the interruptions the machines induce in each other when attached make exact duplication, the perfect Pas De Deux, nearly impossible. Instead, the inefficiency and uncertainty inherent in these machines produce something altogther new from their attempts to dance together.

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