Floating Lines
Exhibition of sculptures and surfaces made by describing the path of a CNC machine rather than the object, shown at the Anne Kittrell Art Gallery, University of Arkansas.
Floating Lines gathered sculptures and surfaces made by an interdisciplinary group of students from mathematics, computer science, architecture, and philosophy. The work began from a single shift in viewpoint: instead of describing the object you want and asking software to reach it, you describe the line the machine itself will follow.
Thinking about the line rather than the object lets a designer hold together two kinds of mark: what the human hand can achieve and the complexity a machine can interpret. The pieces shown ranged from contoured Voronoi panels to flowing end-grain surfaces and routed spirals.
The exhibition ran at the Anne Kittrell Art Gallery on the fourth floor of the Arkansas Union, January 21 to February 14, 2014, with a reception on January 22. It is an early thread of the wider Technology Craft work on controlling the machine rather than its output.
