Whether walking with tails or on attenuated legs, the figures seem oddly uplifting. They are all going somewhere, somehow and no one is normal. In a sea of freaks, each is simply a being.
Called The Population, the all-white figures are placed on a white table in a white environment, a choice the artist explained in a video interview conducted at the installation, titled Segment 151, which displayed of 300 of her figures:
“For me, I like to think that this sort of absence of color is blank. It’s something where they are just starting their development; it’s just starting their evolution. And while it is blank and unprescribed, it also makes them very simple. It’s intentional, to hopefully allow the viewer to focus in on just the mutation, really that is the important part: looking at what is different in each one.”
The figures are sculpted in ZBrush, starting with the creation of a basic form from spheres. Each limb is pushed and pulled to cause its individual type of deformation. Additional details are then added to the 3D form using the program’s advanced sculpting tools. When the sculpting is complete, Milks poses the figures in space and the file is rendered to create the final image of the creature.
Bringing these individuals from digital to physical is made possible in such numbers by 3D printing them. To say nothing of the time required for the design of each figure, the making of 20,000 sculptures, even were they all to be the same, would be time consuming when performed in a non-industrial setting. The ability to utilize a 3D printer gives this single artist the possibility for creating this type of work in a greatly compressed time frame.
The idea that human beings are all one big family is predicated on the macro scale view that smooths over the differences among us as individuals. The scale of these figures–they range from 2″ to 6″ or so–means that as we view them in a video or from from a standing position at the foot of the table, they at first appear to be relatively homogeneous. We have to let our eyes adjust and really begin to look before we can see that they are, in fact, even more extremely different than was imagined. And yet, there is no difficulty realizing that they, together, constitute a population. This oscillation between generalization and specificity is one that each of us confronts every day. Members of a group are conceptualized as generically similar and yet any careful examination reveals that to be an absurd impossibility. We know this, and yet we continue to work in the abstract with categories, while the edge between these two lenses is rough and sometimes damaging.
That is, in and of itself, pretty amazing.
Let us know your thoughts about this incredible conceptual piece in the 20,000 3D Printed Figures forum thread over at 3DPB.com. Check out more images from Milks’ art below.