I feel very elated at the fact that I was asked to be an artist in residence for a few weeks at the EchoFab Fablab in Montreal, Canada. It is  a great opportunity as an artist like myself to be given the facilities that a FabLab has to enable me to produce something that truly mixes traditional and newer technologies.

This invitation also came after in some ways a pretty low productivity and direction-less week workwise, so a good thing to remember is that when things don’t seem to be going well, something sometimes comes along that puts you back on your ‘path’ and allows one to focus on important goals.

The first day involved myself getting to know the facilities of this FabLab. The manager, Marc, Chargé de projet Fab Lab and all the other workers there were extremely helpful offering me advice as to how various machines worked.  You can also go to the link on the EchoFab blog here too for some more information about each day.

In tomorrow’s post you will get more of an idea as to what I want to develop as the final piece. For now, the following images show some of the ways I got to know some of the machines in the Fab Lab. As I always say in my lessons ‘Learn By Doing’, I do this too…

Processes used and developed today as in the slideshow above are-

1. Preparation of a pre-made 3ds Max mesh for 3d printing

2. Optimisation in the application Cura, Ultimaker To Prepare The 3d Mesh, this also prepares the 3d printer settings

3. Setup of the 3d printer

4. 3d Print in Progress, the UFO takes shape and is built up layer by layer

5. As above

6. The finished 3d model

7. Experimenting with a 3d scanner

8. Development of an abstract clay model shape ready to scan into the computer as a 3d model

9. Development concept idea for the art piece that I want to work on. Watch this space…

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