Techne

Rupert Norfolk profile

Rupert Norfolk

Kingston University London (2016 )

Thesis

The Mobility of Facts

About

Sculpture uses material to create and occupy space. Digital technology produces a new kind of space characterised by its apparent immateriality. It is incumbent on sculpture to address recent technological developments if it is to continue to represent the image of its own time. My research will use digital media to crystallise what is particular to sculpture; addressing, repudiating and reconfiguring notions of digital immateriality and weightlessness. In what ways can digital processes mediate the production of a new form of sculptural encounter? How can sculpture engage with a virtual realm unconstrained by what is possible and impossible in actuality?  My procedure will experiment with and test cutting-edge technologies including 3D scanning and modelling, to ‘de-materialise’ existing objects by capturing their data digitally. I will then use the ‘virtual’ space of 3D software to rework these objects according to mathematical transformations like recursion, reflection, rescaling and superimposition. Finally, I will transpose these objects back into tangible materials by combining rapid prototyping with the haptic interaction and chance operations of traditional sculptural processes like manual tooling and analogue casting. My methodology will be informed by a theoretical enquiry into the dialectic between the means applied to production and the contingencies of encounter.  A commonly perceived quality of cyberspace is its fundamental disembodying aspect. Because sculpture allows a bodily encounter with objects in the literal space of the viewer, my Fine Art research will use mimesis to investigate how virtuality is materially produced, rendering its mechanisms conspicuous and making its objects appear strange. By confronting the viewer with empirical phenomena my research will bring to light our contradictory relations to objects in an expanding world. These sculptural encounters could be seen as paradigmatic for encounters in a world where the limits of what we think of as reality have become less clear.