Artist Shane Hope creates ornate, abstract paintings using low-cost 3-D printers. Photo: Shane Hope The 3-D printed parts are inspired by biological forms. Photo: Shane Hope Each painting takes between a week and month to complete. Photo: Shane Hope Each painting is assembled by hand. Photo: Shane Hope Hope leverages open source tools wherever possible: RepRap 3-D printers, Gimp image processing, and Blender for 3-D modeling. Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope Photo: Shane Hope

3-D printers are typically used make high-resolution models or functional prototypes, but artist Shane Hope manipulates them to channel his inner Jackson Pollock. The Brooklyn-based artist creates "paintings" that are densely packed with a rainbow of 3-D printed barnacles. The results are massive, dazzling assemblages—beautiful in the way that spectacular computer glitches can be—and are only matched in manic energy by Hope's descriptions of them. "Seeing 3-D printing as a sort of gateway drug en route toward molecular manufacturing, I thereafter decided I'd visually/literally relate the operative ideologies, promises, and hype of 3-D printing to the R&D and forecasts regarding nanofacture." Heady stuff, and while this jargon-filled description is a tad grandiose, the paintings push the boundaries of low-cost 3-D printers in new and interesting ways.

>He starts by plumbing the Protein Data Bank.

Hope keeps four RepRaps humming constantly, fed with CAD files that follow the same labyrinthine pattern as his artistic statements. He starts by plumbing the Protein Data Bank, a repository of CAD files to build living things, and crafts "nanomolecular machine component models" and "junk DNA sculptural origami." These names sound fantastic, but the actual forms are a bit mundane so he writes Python scripts that evolve the models until interesting shapes emerge. He curates these "code-yielded crops," picking only the most ripe renderings, and uses image editing software to stitch them into colorful maps that will serve as the base for his paintings.

Using the modified molecular models as inspiration, Hope creates printable CAD models using 3-D programs like MeshLab and Blender. The files are printed in batches and Hope intentionally introduces anomalies into the process by changing the speed of his printers mid-way through a job, angling for epic print fails that will reveal new aesthetic opportunities. He even goes so far as to experiment with the plastic build material, coloring the filaments with permanent markers and fusing together different colored strands to achieve novel aesthetic results. For centuries artists have created their own tools—old masters grinding their own pigments and such—and Hope has carried that tradition forward by carefully recording the print settings that lead to the most outrageous outputs.

>"I’ve always thought paint ought to behave like scar tissue."

With a collection of printed parts that looks like a large-scale petri dish, Hope begins gluing pieces to the ersatz canvases. Some of his creations have the depth of relief sculptures while others look like plasticy impasto paintings. Paint brushes will even be used when he thinks the printed elements need to be unified. "I’ve always thought paint ought to behave like scar tissue; heuristic evidence of paying dues, earning injuries, and also healing," he says. "So for me, this is as much about handicrafts as it is the hyperextended hand of the artist." This exhaustive process can stretch from a week to a month depending on size and complexity and he typically has multiple projects running at once in different stages of completion.

The obvious question is why go through all this trouble? "I aim to increase awareness of what I foresee as imminent object-shock," says Hope. "Things heretofore thought to be built might instead in the future appear to arise from the nanoscale and/or instantly congeal into complex configurations from utility fog."

Translation: In the future we will manipulate objects at the atomic level rather than the relatively crude process of heating up plastic and having a robot squirt it onto a slab of metal. He predicts it might be difficult for humans to comprehend of this concept without "mental augmentation" and these paintings act like the first step in that educational process.

Shane Hope is represented by the Winkleman Gallery in New York City.