3D Printing the Future
Museum of Science & Industry (MOSI), Manchester

September 10, 2013 – February 7, 2015

October 23, 2014 – April 19, 2015

The exhibition explores and revels in how 3D Printing has advanced and revolutionised various fields of industry from science to art and design. With over 300 3D objects on display it is a real tribute to how creativity and technology can combine to result in a replacement body part or an exquisite piece of art. For the visionary, the potential directions of 3D printing are not only exciting but seemingly endless.

Tobias Klein’s Synthetic Heart was exhibited in 3D Printing of the Future.

Synthetic Heart is a direct result of sculpting the Magnetic Resonance Image data of the artist, creating a ghostly 3D printed Doppelgänger. Entirely 3D printed, using a UV cured resin that allows light transmission deep into the newly formed digital organ, The work comments on the current status of our wish for immortality, longevity and preservation in today’s digital data context.

As a research project explores the human body as a new ecology of densities. The dissolution of the body’s anatomical boundaries allows the reconsideration and recreation of it as a new physical territory in constant flux and change. It questions the common representations of the body in the digital realm as a series of surfaces and layers, and creates a potential new status where the modulation of the body’s inner and outer surfaces becomes irrelevant. By using advanced medical visualisation techniques as both method and tool to redesign the body with variable intensities of matter, the obsolete notion of a finite body is exposed in favour of a new type of body-space that is, above all, a viscous field of variable concentrations of mass and matter.