Dear Tony: an unauthorized, distributed Tony Smith retrospective

Fred writes, "Over the course of nearly two decades (1961-'79), the artist Tony Smith made forty-seven monumental public sculptures using an iterative process for arranging monochrome, modular triangular units into different configurations. Smith made very few advance drawings of these sculptures, instead designing them ad-hoc with three-dimensional models in his studio space, often times borrowing pieces from an earlier sculpture to begin or finish the next."

He also lived and worked 15 minutes away from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey where many of today's CGI techniques were first developed. Despite these connections, his sculpture has never been discussed in terms of the history of digital design.

In an effort to change that, my brother and artist Christian de Vietri just released 'Dear_Tony' an unauthorized, distributed retrospective of his public sculptures.

Since Smith's individual works can be easily reproduced by 3D printers, they created a composite of his sculptures into a single 3D printable, shareable model and posted it on the Pirate Bay. Despite the simplicity of its individual parts, the resulting work is the work uniquely complex: it cannot be cast or carved using traditional sculpting techniques, it can only be 3D printed.

They've also setup a Shapeways storefront if you want to buy an physical version of the meta-sculpture.


(Thanks, Fred!)