3D Printing the Future
Science Museum London, UK

September 10, 2013 – February 7, 2015

3D printers inspire creativity: the exhibition wall is an explosion of over 600 printed objects. But where’s the real innovation? Explore this exhibition to discover how innovators are using 3D printers to turn computer data into physical objects that could change your life. The stories we’ve uncovered focus on the future of industry, medicine and whether 3D printing will change your shopping experience. See lighter, more efficient plane parts created through 3D printing that could save fuel on your flights. Check out 3D printed replacement body parts – from those already used today, to the possible 3D printed organs of the future. Discover the open-source mechanical hand that carpenter Richard Van As made on a consumer machine to replace his missing fingers. And see how 3D printing can inspire artists in Inversive Embodiment, an intricate sculptural work by Tobias Klein that incorporates MRI scans and St Paul’s Cathedral. How will 3D printing shape your future?

The exhibition is organized by Antoniw Suzy.

Inversive Embodiment‘ is part of a larger body of work titled ‘EMBODIMENT’, which explores scaleless referential spaces and relationships between anatomical voxel data sets and ecclesial, iconographic architecture. The work has been on display at the Science Museum London and attracted in the show over one million visitors.

Inversive Embodiment is a fusion of the sacred and secular – the embodiment of our iconographic now. Developed from Magnetic Resonance Images – live medical body data, 3D printed and inserted into St Paul’s Cathedral: The Sacred Heart amalgamates symbiotically and constructively the qualities of precisely contoured geometries of historic monumental architecture with synthetic topographies, digital ornament, and volumetric voluptuous embodiment of MRI generated organs. Space is sculpted viscerally and digitally: creating the new sacred Heart.