"What would it look like if and after our overclocked-offspring (quicker-thinking posthuman descendants) decide to disassemble everything we know for spare parts?" posits Shane Hope. It's this bleak vision that inspires the American artist's work.

Hope explores the them through a series of intricately layered sculptural artworks made using his own DIY 3D printers. Each image is representative of this dystopian future, where our every atom can all be manufactured and manipulated.

Meshing 3D printing with nanotechnology and synthetic biology, he builds his works using CAD files generated using algorithms based on molecular models. They draw on information retrieved from Protein Data Bank files (where the structures of proteins and nucleic acids are recorded) and models of bits of DNA or even manmade constructs like sheets of graphene.


He then uses PyMOL, an opensource visualisation system which produces high resolution 3D images of molecules, and then runs Python scripts, using algorithms to automatically generate "formal derivations" of the original. Or, as Hope explains rather hyperbolically, to "fractalise aminos off forms to perform generative crystallography, code for crazy carbon chaining".

Shane Hope

Read next London’s National Gallery was hit by the biggest art heist in history London’s National Gallery was hit by the biggest art heist in history

Once these mutations are done being transformed, he curates the "code-yielded crops", picking off the best bits and stitching them back together into what he calls "Qubit-Built Quilts". He uses 3D mesh processing software MeshLab to further tweak his models, before actually beginning the print process using a RepRap -- a low cost opensource 3D printer that can print its own parts. Hope chooses to build his own, rather than use one on the market like MakerBot, because he says it enables you to imbue them with an artistic sensibility they otherwise would not have. It's a way of instilling craftsmanship in an automated process. "Sourcing or printing all your own parts separately and having to hand-hobble it all into working order each time produces printers with personality. If you can hack them well enough, these machines prove to exhibit expressionistic potential. I can hear my gear and let it talk too." This, he suggests, allows the medium to become "as much about handicrafts as it is the hyperextended hand of the artist", with painting, collage, biology and technology crashed together in a beautiful mess.

Shane Hope


He's created custom print settings so that the end result is more like a painting than a manufactured piece. The piece is not made in one go, but is an assembly of many different portions of these DNA strands and protein molecule representations glued together and painted to form a more cohesive whole ("I've always thought paint ought to behave like scar tissue," comments Hope, a trained painter). When you think about it, it's pretty horrifying.

The colourful mass that makes up each piece actually represents a totally incoherent biological mass that will hopefully never be brought to life.

Shane Hope

Read next Lockdown has put museums and galleries on the brink of collapse Lockdown has put museums and galleries on the brink of collapse

Hope says he's "over the folk psychological novelty of 3D printing for its own sake", and is instead now looking to represent new hopes presented by molecular biology R&D projects, as well as "problematise prototyping... to expose that which isn't exhausted or collapsed into fully exploitable usability in the functionalist sense". If you hadn't guessed, Hope is a fan of extrapolating big theories from his artwork with big words. But essentially he's hacking the media of the day -- 3D printing and synthetic biology -- to show how our future could potentially be chopped and changed by those in control of the technology: in the advent of 3D printing, that's ourselves.


He considers his work a form of "future studies" in which he corrects the obscene and falsified images of the future as depicted in 70s sci-fi and rehashed interminably ever since. "It's from contemporary technoprogressive, technoanarchist, transhumanist, H+, hard sci-fi and singularitarian ideas that I filter-out fodder for more forward-looking worthwhile visual responses."

Shane Hope

Hope's utopia/dystopia is not too much more optimistic than those already being depicted in popular culture. "Materiality may become all about atomic administrator access-privileges and whether or not you can root your reality," he says. "'Now' is ever-changing anyway, an exponentially moving target of a black hole with manifold meanwhiles all the way across. Anthropocentric narrative coherence won't much help us survive the slippery slopes of singularity-spike-like futures over-patchworked into ever more radicalised presentisms."

Hope is also a fan of making up words to make his point, but when you're dealing with disseminating our fragile, fragmented future, a future where human biology is potentially hacked, altered and printed at the touch of a button, that's probably ok.

Shane Hope


"It may come-to-pass that what you print is how you process what you are," he tells Wired.co.uk. "Any limit is up to us inasmuch as we are ourselves always 'us' as also 'us-plus'."

3D printing will revolutionise our future by making "real-time instantiation of at-will thought-forms become a freedom of expression issue" he says. "Post-printability of anythingyness means we won't just be saying stuff, we'll be saying in stuff itself. I like to think this'll be like thinking in objecthoods or talking more like manipulating materiality." Basically, we'll be talking in objects in the advent of 3D printing, and materiality will take over to such an extreme extent, it will provide a new way of communicating everything.

Also, his pieces are pretty nice to look at.