 We will dive into 3D printing in relation to the arts soon, but I would like to start out at a higher level. I'll address this question to Adam. Adam, how would you say the arts community adjusted to the digital age as opposed to, in comparison to some other industries? Yeah, well, you know, first it's difficult to generalize. But, I'll generalize, you know, so I think you have to make a distinction right between sort of individual independent artists and arts institutions. And arts institutions and also sort of corporate media, really, because you might want to put that into the same umbrella, sort of big bureaucratic entities that are in the arts and media world versus independent actors. And I think we've seen a real separation there, actually, and part of it has to do with technology. This is a great time to say that independent artists have really embraced everything that the internet has brought them from, you know, if you think about film editing equipment that would have cost you, you know, $20,000 in 1995 and now comes for free on your phone, or maybe you have to pay $0.99 for it in an app store or something, right? And there's a million examples like that. People are financing their work on Kickstarter and, you know, they're getting rid of the intermediaries of the gatekeepers of the 20th century, which is really allowing, you know, millions of independent voices to have a platform that wouldn't have been possible without all this tech. At the same time, you know, I think the sort of big arts, right? So symphony orchestras and ballet companies and museums to some extent, you know, you might also put, you know, Hollywood and the music industry under this umbrella. I think they had a really hard time with it. You know, you had people suing their customers. You've got people, you know, kicking people out of theaters because they're tweeting about the show, even if they're saying positive things. They're going to sell more tickets. So there's been a really, there have been a lot of challenges kind of wrapping their mind around the fact that technology is, whether you like it or not, changing the way that art is made, the way it's distributed, the way it's financed, the way it's consumed. And you can either work with it or you can get left behind. Unfortunately, I think we're starting to turn the corner on that. In general, those folks, as opposed to the independent artists, have not done a great job of giving up. We heard in the most recent panel that there is a workforce skills gap that is plaguing thousands of workers in the nation and really affecting the manufacturing industry. So off of that question that I just asked Adam, any of you can feel free to answer this. You know, is there a skills gap when it comes to technology among artists in the arts community, specific to 3D printing or not? Well, as we know, there's a wealth of information on the internet. You can how to anything. But in these applications, we're finding artists come to maker spaces so that they can pull for the knowledge as they need it. If you have a project in mind or if you want to explore a medium, artists are coming to maker spaces where they can have access to technology. It's not just about the machine, of course. It all starts with design, learning design programming. I mean, start with a sketch and then you have to translate it. And so this idea of having access to testing out your ideas, it may not be the final, but the active experimentation is highly valuable. I would say though there is a gap for, I mean, for a studio like ours where when we're trying to hire people, there's a lot of people who might be willing to sketch an idea and then go through all the engineering work or contract engineers to execute something. What we don't find is people who think through the technology in a creative way. I don't see people or as many as I would like that embrace it as a medium. They're discriminating directly in that medium. There's been more and more of that recently, but it's still not, it's not something you're tripping over. Finding people like that are still very, very hard to find. So what would you say separates the people who are like that from those who are not, from artists who are not embracing that technology? Is it a generational difference or is it an issue of perception within the community? I don't know what it is exactly. I find the people that end up fitting that profile have very diverse backgrounds. They're people that maybe just love too many things in their life and they have this really amazing skill set, which is probably what an artist should be anyway. But I find there's a lot on that you get siloed into these very specific disciplines like I'm going to be a painter or I'm going to be this or even architects and designers, we find that there are certain schools or certain institutions that resist technology more than others. And it comes from what I've seen in the academic world and the arts and the design. It comes from the philosophical, philosophically rooted methodology that they teach. Rather than necessarily looking all the time at what's happening in the market and what people are needing. And I'm not saying that art has to do this, but I think design does. And that would be my final point of understanding the skills in hiring. Thank you. Kate, I think you had thoughts on this. Yeah, a couple of things. I think as a studio artist, what the skills gap for me, which there is, has allowed for collaboration with 3D modelers and trying to get my ideas which in itself has been really exciting as an artist as it brings two people into thinking about and solving problems in a way. I think in my own case, it's generational. But with my students at RISD, they come with the knowledge of how to use 3D modeling software. They might not know the material that we're working with, but then again, it's also a collaboration because they're very comfortable designing things, but they need to know a little bit about what the material is. What we don't know, and I guess this is a bigger issue, is most artists, or even is the programming. There's only certain things that you can do with the modeling software, but I guess eventually if artists were more involved with actually programming, that would help. If, and I'll address this to the group as well, if you had to name one obstacle that artists face in incorporating technology like 3D printing into their work, whether that's an internal or external obstacle, what do we think that is? I think it's an internal obstacle, and I think it's one that not everyone faces, but a lot of artists I think still have this sort of mentality that is often instilled in an educational context where there's this belief that, okay, there's sort of artists as romantic other, and all I have to do is be in my studio and do my art, and if I think about commerce or technology or anything other than the craft and the aesthetics, that that's somehow un-pure. And I think that's just a poisonous, terrible way to approach your work. Certainly the people who we see succeed are the ones who don't have that kind of mentality who are looking at their work holistically in a social and an economic context, and a big part of that is technology. So they're willing to get their hands dirty. They don't see it as somehow beneath them or something that their agent should do for them or whatever, right? It's part of the work. Anyone else want to pull something up? I feel like Phyllis does. I can sense it. Well, we exist outside the realm. I mean, there's a lot of fab labs in community colleges and universities, but for the most part, it's not part of a traditional structure. It's a place of invention. So you come. It's individual-driven. And so I shudder to try to generalize about artists. I just think that having this as an external condition, it's about having access. And if you provide, whether it be a hobbyist, a technologist, a musician, a fine artist, just having access to experiment with it, the current limitations are that at the consumer level, 3D printing is limited in size, although it's been hacked by jurists with Ultimaker, where he's created rails and turned it upside down and flipped ahead and he creates huge things. He is the ultimate artist hacker who is defying the limitations as we know it. He's one example. But I think that, you know, right now 3D printing is limited in size, it's limited in materials, but there's many people working to get around that. We have some people in the audience who have created new 3D printers that people can build in a day. There's people working on alternate materials. I mean, it gets boring if you're just working with PLS and ABS plastic. If you get to work in ceramic or glass, as they do at MIT, you know, you can think bigger about it. So part of it's the limitation of what's available, and then part of it's up to the artists if they have the resources or the community to start to adapt the machines and the technology for what they want to do. And so if you think of it self-driven, if you've conceived of something and you want to test it out, you're going to learn whatever you need to learn in order to make it happen and maker spaces enable that. I wonder if any one of my panelists can give an example of a work or some sort of creative process that an artist was empowered by 3D printing to something that could not have existed without 3D printing, perhaps to my mind. If that came, maybe you might have some examples with your students. Well, again, it's... we're working within this ceramic design and there are certain things that can be printed that can't be made in another way. I think one of the issues as far as accessibility to artists is still an external thing. It's still a pretty expensive process. It's not that available, but that's all going to change and I think more people will have access to it. But I think that comes to the point of approaching it for the things that it can do and somebody said this in a panel before. It's a tool in the toolbox and right now there's a novelty to it and people want to do it and use it for everything. But I think where it's going to really move forward, people will see what it can do specifically and uniquely that's going to move it forward. So is there a perception within the arts community that an artist who incorporates 3D printing is what, XYZ? Does that gain more respect or is it perceived as a bit of a cop-out because it's not that traditional art form? I think that depends again on the person you're talking to. Some people feel that absolutely. You come from a tradition where you have to make everything by hand and you have to be sort of a romantic notion because even artists that are painters could have 15 people working for them and painting for them. I think that's the difference if they have to award people to work for them or a printer. But this was, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, that notion of the artist working for them in the studio wasn't even, it wasn't even true in the Renaissance, right? I mean, they've had these sort of studio models for people in the Renaissance. It worked forever. I mean, we do sell some artworks. It's about 20% of our revenue. I gotta be honest with you, we look at it as a product, right? If it's helping us make it better, if it's helping us make things that are novel and have been done before, it helps to open up new ideas. I don't really necessarily see problems with it. I mean, the people who sell our work and provide them with the same, and I find often that the fact that it's some sort of newer novel technology usually helps provide cultural significance in context for those pieces. Because, you know, we're experimenting with new techniques in a lot of these cases, and the value for the object. So yeah, it's not, I haven't seen it to be hundreds at all. You know, we have a fab lab now at Haystack, which is the mountain school of craft, which has traditionally been things crafted by hand. It's difficult to get the internet up there unless you drive to the town library. And when the group there first heard that about the possibility of having a fab lab, it was met with a lot of resistance. Why do we need this, you know, 3D printing or, you know, CNC routing and laser cutting. I happened to go up and work in the lab with traditional artists when it was in its second year. And it was amazing the way it was embraced and the degree of experimentation in the way that they were very seamlessly and avidly incorporating it, even if it was just a prototype in an experiment. So I think anything that if you look at it in that context at one point the anvil was new technology, you know. So I think that it's wonderful that it's an option and artists are in the business of defining expectations. Why do we care if somebody thinks XYZ of it, unless you're in business and you're producing a product and you have a market, but I think I know, but what I'm saying is in the process of exploring ideas it's you know, I think it's a wonderful avenue and I think a lot of artists are curious in embracing it. Do you want to respond? No, I was just funny, I mean I think it's always kind of a sort of subject, the idea that artists don't have a market or don't have to respond to those things and I find that's actually if we do run into any problem with using technologies or using the subject of ubiquity is a problem. We're dealing with digital files, we're dealing with things that are potentially infinitely reputable at a low cost and at some point maybe even more so than they are right now and honestly looking at it objectively I feel very often when we produce those kinds of pieces we're making a commodity in many ways. So the idea of that commodity being digital is a bit of a question and it always has been for me. And we do work a lot with luxury brands and we've done things where we would have stuff generate in themselves once on the website and go away forever and make sure certain parameters never exist again in a kind of effort to produce exclusivity or scarcity. Because I think that's a factor that we really can't ignore when we're talking about it. I mean people have bought photographic prints without owning the negative as fine art for a long time. That's very established conventions around that kind of thing and usually it's a limited edition so it's not just it's not going to the shelves at Target or Bed Bath & Beyond they're going to be 15 of them made. One of the interesting things that and I don't know a ton about this but that I have been watching a little bit is obviously 3D printing raises all sorts of intellectual property challenges and questions and issues that we're going to have to resolve but there are companies for example that are using there's a company I know based in New York and I'm liking their name but they're using the blockchain which is the sort of underlying technology under Bitcoin to essentially track the ownership of a digital work and you can sell it and it can't be duplicated beyond what's been authorized by the original owner. So there are ways of solving those problems and people are doing some interesting stuff in that front. Now we have many members of the 3D printing community in this audience so I'm really interested to learn your thoughts on what the 3D printing community ought to do to remain relevant and to become more relevant to artists in the arts community. Anyone? I stomp that. Keep making more tools. I think earlier we were talking about cost and accessibility of 3D printing. I think one of the biggest things that have changed my practice the first print that we ever made was it was a $30,000 print. If I go back now and I try to recreate that same piece we would get all the machines we needed to do that for that price and all the material and I would have had a whole flat lab for that thing. I think what we are able to do now and the diversity of tools that we have in the studio now and even though we don't use all of those as final production pieces and we still might send pieces out, it's enabled the level of experimentation that we couldn't have before because a lot of these machines especially the ones that are more open and actually the desktop machines in particular they become like R&D platforms for us or like development kits so we can try out things without really risking very much and if something works then we can go to someone and say hey we tried this on this machine it's not that much different can we do it here so it's really pushed innovation for us a lot so for us the more open or even if you want to produce a machine that is a completely closed ecosystem I have a version of that that's like a development platform it's like having a software environment that's safe that you can develop applications in because ultimately I mean it's designers and people like us they're going to be finding applications for these tools and we need a way that's you know you might have done a really good market research and figure it out exactly like what the automotive industry needs in a printer but like what if we're working on a project that really isn't in the market yet but it is a long-term desire that comes there's things that people are going to come up against that are in the industry that you can't anticipate and I think having development platforms would really help secure a strong future for 3D printing I mean technologies like 3D printing they're already developing at a kind of Moore's law style accelerating written terms so there's exponential growth that's happening in terms of price and performance and all the rest it's going to take care of itself honestly I mean artists are resourceful so again they're generalized artists tend to be resourceful they don't have a lot of money so they tend to be cost sensitive so great I mean as the price naturally falls and is falling already pretty quickly as we start being able to work with more in different kinds of materials there's going to be a real flourishing of creativity I'm confident and I would think Phyllis having makerspaces available to artists is a real key we're actually trying to develop a fellowship program where we can invite creatives visual artists people from really musicians playwrights poets to invite them to come and be able to really spend an adequate amount of time for them to develop studio practice in the lab potentially produce a body of work be able to show it we have an awesome loft space for exhibitions and if they so choose if they're interested in collaborating with the group of fellows if they want to share with the community there's the opportunity to do that and so providing a collaborative experience and also access to the machines not just as sort of a drive by but really more like studio practice is what we're trying to launch so we're talking with some local artists now and if anybody in this room is interested feel free to be in touch well when I first found this company in Boston I approached them about sponsoring an exhibition where they would do all the printing for the six different artists that were coming together so it was a perfect collaboration they were a little hesitant at first in working with artists but I think through the process they got very excited about what was being printed on their machines that they didn't even have the sense could be done and that's also driven them to try to work on different software to improve the machines to do more of the things we were trying to do so I'd say getting working having the people making the machines working with closely with artists and designers is one way to move things forward I'd like to open things up to the audience for questions Lauren Hi Lauren with that shapeway vegetation I have a question for you guys that reflects on the IP issue that was raised briefly before but the reason that materials and developments in 3D printing industrial 3D printing specifically are not moving at a pace that we like is largely because of patents and exclusivity around technology and we're going to see an acceleration because those patents are expiring and I know that patents and copyright and trademark are all very different things and you have friends in the room or in the building that can go very deep but I suppose my question is really around digging deeper into that question of copyright and artistic individuality and the allure of an individual piece I'm one of the oldest digital natives I think I got an email account when I was 12 years old that kind of thing so to me it doesn't seem that strange to be able to share a file and you mentioned photography being a fine art practice where you can sell limited editions but they had to fight for that photographers in the early 20th century had to fight for that legitimacy in the fine art world and make it a real thing by making that falsely making that exclusivity and now that that's no longer really possible what do we do? what do we do? my argument though is like is it really not possible? because I'm assuming you're alluding that what if someone scans the sculpture or like we saw a computer reproduce Rembrandt I mean this assumes that there is some sort of tool to enable someone to replicate that infinitely and I think I was talking about this a lot just because you might have a scan of something that's injection molded that doesn't mean it's going to be a good 3D printed part or have the same qualities or anything like that but a future wherein we have a lot of 3D printed content then yes because then we're going to have valuable data that can be replicated in that way so there was a case that came up in the lab recently where some people came in and printed a 3D scan of Nefertiti's bus I think the one in the loop and the print is I did it it was I'm not bragging it was really really good it was like .06 layer height but I was thinking like where did this scan come from and who owns the scan because somebody owns the statue I successfully sold it to a different museum to prove that it could be done what I found when I was reading was this really good ALI paper written for librarians that talked about separability to where if you can distinguish copyright or intellectual property if you can sever the artistic value of something away from its functional value but then also on top of that the ownership of the digital file is different than the ownership of the actual object the owner of the statue can claim ownership of the statue but couldn't claim ownership of the actual scan of the digital file this largely depends on what the value is I mean if it's a trademark or something like if it's the image of the thing like Mickey Mouse that's something else but people have been selling successfully selling counterfeit art for hundreds of years this is not new or digital technology even right so I guess I tend to be pretty blase about this actually if you look at the early days of file sharing and music if you set up if you are convinced that your customers are stealing things from you and you set up an antagonistic relationship and you sue them and all this kind of stuff like that doesn't work you're gonna lose but what we saw was that if you make it relatively easy and a fair price to buy the content that you want people will pay for it most people are honest most people are not trying to scan you they just don't like being treated like criminals when people are not so I think there are sort of behavioral economic answers to a lot of the stuff if you're getting knocked off like that I long for the day that I walk down Canal Street and see a knockoff handbag because that means there's a desire for this thing it's just a reminder that people buying those knockoff bags are not the people buying that other piece so it's a different kind of customer and I think if anything it's an indicator of success that the PD scan was to return to the country of origin a copy of the object not to steal the object for personal purposes so the artist that's the reason why they sent me did that they also lied that they stole the lead in the file they didn't create it themselves that's another issue but their issue was to decolonize and the busk itself might actually be fake so but an old thing so their idea was to decolonize and decolonize something that had been taken from the country of origin okay, thanks for clarifying that Bernard, let's go to you right here so I just want to go back to the education component one of the things I've been kind of really special about is with a craft you have an objective if you get to be objective and your steps take the objective and then with making you actually have a goal you have to reach and the way you reach that goal can be any number of ways and so how do you measure success in terms of getting to an objective with a craft versus with making because a lot of times I'm hearing with these 3D printers the reason why there's a 3D printer called a WASP that can actually print with ceramic it can actually make that will be kind of deterred because there's no way to measure success there's no technique that can be measured there's no process no, I don't think that's true at all we've done some ceramic printing and I would think there, I mean you still have to set up your settings you have the program printer in a lot of cases a lot of things we do we don't even make software to do what we're trying to do or I think there's very if you want to achieve any effects that are going to be desirable I find it is very much a craft this is what Kate does right? let's hear it from Kate well I do think that the material that some understanding what the inherent qualities and the material are important but again with my RISD students and this with the project I worked in it's a ceramic production class they're learning all aspects of the material but I did this 3D printing project with them at the very beginning before they really knew about the material but they do have to design things and there's always a back and forth when you don't know the material and don't understand what it does so I think again with everything you do need some knowledge of what the material is that you're working with but and then again for it to be successful is use it, use the tool it's you know just like you'd use the wheel you can make things pottery and the wheel to make a certain type of thing if you want symmetry so that's you go to that tool or slip casting or but the 3D printing can do things you can't do any other way but you still have to know that it's going to be subject to 2013 and it's been a you know wall thicknesses have to be a certain thing in it and there's material properties that are different than plastic that are different than metal just to follow up on that I guess I'm curious to hear from you and Phyllis and Francis and obviously you do Adam if you have any other side to this whether 3D processes are fundamentally changing the artistic process I don't mean by just adding new materials and new tools or even new ways of doing things but I'm kind of thinking you know analogous to the way the internet has really transformed communication and arguably you know the way young artists in particular contemporary artists music artists think about approaching their craft and their work before reproduction the only way you could make money as a musician or a performer was live then you had albums and all of that it's almost as though we've come full circle because independent artists especially are giving away their music for free and making their audience and again I don't really just want to limit it to the economic but to the real artistic process and then you'll change there it's a loaded question for me it's the only process I've ever known so I don't know if I can say there's a changer or not just always worked that way I was an art major originally in college I was terrible I can't draw, I can't really I can't sculpt but I could code so that was just the way I kind of found I could best express myself but so I don't know I'm sure they probably have more to say coming from a traditional studio background Yes I would say yes I think it's expanding our visual language there are things that you see that that you wouldn't have seen 10 years ago that are being made so that in that way it is it's expanding the way that we actually create it's a new way it's when you're working with a computer as opposed to when you're working by hand I don't I try not to say which one is better I just think that we're seeing different things and that's because of the process let's go back I want to go back to a topic that we touched on earlier about the artist's relationship to technology and I would kind of disagree with what seemed to be the characterization of artists not really embracing the technology so much themselves I think artists have throughout all of history whether that's metal casting or early access to video cameras video art was the whole thing and there were early involvements in those things I feel like there was sort of a law maybe in the 80s and 90s and in the early 2000s where there wasn't as much direct involvement and I think that in some ways artists sort of ceded innovation to technologists in some ways and they weren't really intimately connected and I think that does relate a lot to the academy at that point but I think that there's been a huge catch up lately I can at least say for the institution where I am and there's been a major capital investment in getting this technology at the hands of these students and they you put those tools in their hands and they take it very quickly and very eagerly to me where I see that we don't have the same level of capital investment is more on the market side there isn't that every other sector there's massive investment in technology if anybody is new with innovative technology there's just money funneled into that like here like in the arts there's money funneled into painting over like painting and painting it's like in the order of painting the whole money so I guess from somebody who's involved in funding with arts and somebody who is like making a practice in sort of hybrid space and again I think our institutions are really embracing this hybridity as well I'd just like to hear you guys thoughts on how we can make our culture more sort of receptive and supportive so artists can have this meaningful role in developing these technologies I'd like to hear people's thoughts on how what we can do culturally and maybe politically or economically to keep artists engaged in the development of these technologies how can we provide that support artists find a way and when that's part of the adventure of it I mean not all artists think alike there are artists I know who can visualize in their head 3D and turn it and then just build it in an analog studio and it's amazing my process is different I have to fumble and stumble with the physical stuff it feels just right these processes I don't think it depends on what your process is clearly if you look at Jonathan Moynihan's work he's working with digital modeling and one could consider that the definition of art is making real an idea a perception or a feeling whether the medium be music or something physical art design and so these processes if you can't turn it in your head and make it you can now learn modeling and do that on the screen that doesn't always translate to how it comes out on a 3D printer but you're getting closer to taking an experience and materializing it anybody who's worked with 3D printing knows that it's not yet the Star Trek Replicator the machines have challenges the software has challenges it's not direct and perfect but it's fun to play with at least from my perspective and I like to see how artists are taking it further and further their own use and exploration I think to your point Ryan Micah is an outstanding example of making these resources available I think more and more schools whether they be this is part of the realm that we work in whether they be public schools independent schools, community college and university with the efforts of the administration efforts with organizations like Fractured Atlas with all that our policy makers are doing it's the thing now everybody wants to figure out how to get this in people's hands and see what they'll do with it in the name of innovation I think from the education perspective the worst thing about what my education was when you're an artist or you take that as your course of study you don't really get a lot of exposure to the sciences you don't get a lot of exposure to the materials that are chemicals you're working with you don't really get the same depth of information that an engineering student might get just like they don't get the same depth of humanity and education that an artist might get I've always found it very problematic the way we break people down into these categories because then when you grow up in life and then they might end up as a kind of ours or something and then they think well I don't have to be good at this I don't have to know that, I don't have to know business I don't have to because I'm an artist and I don't be good at other things or I'm an understanding of appreciation of other things We'll do one final question right here Yeah just kind of continuing on this topic of connecting artists to technologists particularly within a school and university context there's an organization that some of you who are interested in this topic of that intersection might be interested in it's got a terrible name it's called the Alliance for Arts Universities or A2RU but the whole focus of it is really about kind of communicating at the dean level at these different universities around the country to sort of encourage more collaboration and integration between different departments at the university with the arts at the center of that and so I'm not exactly sure kind of like what I only limited familiarity with the organization I don't know what the opportunities are to plug in but it's for people who are interested in this space it's one to be aware of Well certainly this is a topic that we could talk about for hours however we only have this room reserved for a number of minutes so we're going to have to wrap it up but I'd like to thank my panelists today very much if you will indulge me it's really important that we show our gratitude to our sponsors the congressional maker caucus and the rest of it