The Printers Dance
Ongoing suite of kinetic projects, premiered at Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco (primary venue), Distrito 350 and Taller Nodo (secondary venues), Guadalajara, September 13 – 28, 2024.
In collaboration with Zebulon Zang.
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The Printers Dance began with the repurposing of twenty-four aging 3D printers, displaced by newer and more efficient models. Early experiments explored how their moving components—the gliding print beds, the trembling hot ends—could be physically linked so that each machine’s motions pushed, pulled, or shook its neighbors. What began as isolated exchanges between pairs expanded into larger, mobile clusters once the printers were mounted on wheels. In these formations, the laboring gestures of printing transformed into choreographic interactions, a kind of mechanical duet performed between machines.
The project first grew out of practical questions: how might the repetitive motions of 3D printing be reimagined as a form of movement, and what new gestures emerge when production becomes dance? But as the work developed, it also entered into dialogue with a lineage of artworks examining the porous boundary between the organic and the mechanical—how systems of reproduction bind and separate these worlds, and where breakdowns or glitches reveal their limits.
A key reference is Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux (1968), in which two ballet dancers are multiplied across the screen through a chronophotographic technique inherited from Étienne-Jules Marey. McLaren fractures human movement into a sequence of discrete images, revealing the mechanical logic within the fluidity of the body. This mirrors the 3D printer’s own method of “slicing” objects into stacked layers. Yet where McLaren used photography to mechanize dancers, The Printers Dance reverses the direction: the machines’ gestures of mechanical reproduction attempt to mimic the flowing expressivity of human performers.
Of course, 3D printers were not designed to perform. They are tools of fabrication—objects of labor whose obsolescence is built into the accelerating cycles of technological efficiency. Once imagined as replacements for skilled factory workers, 3D printers have instead become niche instruments of creative production. These particular machines, rendered inefficient for their intended tasks, are revived here to attempt the anthropomorphic: to dance.
In theory, their precision should allow them to reproduce any choreography with impeccable accuracy. But anyone familiar with 3D printing knows that perfect reproducibility is rare. External variations, mechanical wear, and the interference created when the machines are physically tethered make exact duplication—and any hope of a flawless pas de deux—nearly impossible. Instead, the printers’ inefficiencies and instabilities generate unexpected movements, producing something genuinely new through their attempts to dance together.
What the printers “attempt” to make as they print and move is shaped by context. For the work’s premiere in Guadalajara, presented across three venues, we drew on the colors and tonalities of José Clemente Orozco’s La Buena Vida, housed in the artist’s final studio. The mural’s revelry—its semi-clothed dancers and satirical portrayal of indulgent excess—became a palette for the performers. As the printers moved, they tried to render these hues, producing a growing visual cacophony. Their dance continued until the exhibition’s close, when the accumulating traces of their labor finally came to rest.
