Thoughts about 3D-printing
Thoughts about 3D-printing and 3D-printing's current stage in my art practice.
The books I read
Currently I am jumping back and forth between the books Ghosts of My Life (M. Fisher), Simulacra and Simulation (J. Baudrillard), a collection of essays by Jorge Luis Borges, and Hyperobjects (T. Morton).
The mediums in question
I am digging for some answers in the medium of 3D-printing and 3D-scanning and trying to find out why these two mediums should be a part of the art world. 3D-printing and 3D-scanning are the most powerful tools and the most interesting mediums I have ever stumbled upon.
I feel that the possibilities to express oneself through these mediums, which I have only scratched the surface of, are immense and full of potential. To walk down a path which very few have walked before is such an honor and quite the challenge. That may also be one of the reasons these mediums intrigue me.
The copy
To scan, make digital copies and 3D-print my colleagues is such a treat and scary to explore. People who are scanned do not refer to the printed sculpture of themself as a sculpture or a copy of themself, rather they refer to it as "me". I often do this myself when talking about a photograph of myself. I can say "Look at me!" or "Look how weird I am looking!", I even think in these terms. The illusion is so close to the real world that I talk and think about it as if it were the real world, even though it is not. This is also the case with the 3D-scans and 3D-prints. The similarity is just good enough that it becomes an illusion of the real world, like photography.
I would like to add simulacra somewhere in here but I do not yet feel the word fitting for the sculptures — maybe this will be more relevant in the future, when the technology advances and is available to the public.
The nude
The feeling of intruding on someone's privacy emerged while holding a scanned sculpture of my girlfriend earlier in the process of exploring the sculptures. It made me feel uncomfortable. I could hold my hand around her sculpture's waist and touch the sculpture's body while holding it. I could see the shadows fall around her butt as it would in real life, and I could see the forms of her boobs underneath her sweater, just like in real life. This made me really uncomfortable, but also made me interested in researching this phenomenon closer.
A couple of months later I scanned the first nude. It was of a classmate of mine, willing to pose for the project. I talked about the project and told him about the risks I knew at the time, the lack of knowledge about the mediums, and therefore the lack of security around his privacy. He still wanted in on the project and I scanned two poses of him. I have yet to print these, but I have worked on the digital models, sculpting them and making them ready to be printed. I worked more carefully than I had before while sculpting, like I would when touching something sensitive — but this was still, in itself, just a sculpture, not real life, which makes me wonder where these feelings come from.
It is somehow more real than a photo, in the sense that I now have control over the context and the object itself. At the same time I feel that I have no control at all. Just like when saving a private picture of oneself on Snapchat, and years later finding out that the picture is saved on a server somewhere I don't know, owned by people I don't know, for a purpose I don't know.
Moving forward
I really like wandering in such unknown terrain, and the uneasy feelings about it make me even more intrigued to explore more. I will continue to write about scanning, sculpting and printing sculptures of people from the real world. There is something here that is really vibrating or glitching — something that does not belong in either world, but just keeps jumping back and forth from digital to real, again and again. I want to dig deeper and explore the possibilities of these mediums, and I will.
Jørgen Bryn 08.03.2026