Dan Collins, Associate Professor of Intermedia within the School of Art at Arizona State University, is also co-director of PRISM (Partnership for Research in Stereo Modeling) Lab, an interdisciplinary 3-D modeling and rapid prototyping facility. His research has been focused on technical advances in 3-D digital imaging technologies and their usefulness in the arts. His work with such methods of input as 3-D laser scanners and medical diagnostic tools (CT and MRI) and modes of 3D software modeling has been coupled with such types of output as computer numerically controlled milling (CNC), stereolithography and laser sintering. The purpose of all this technology for Collins is to better understand problems of representation with respect to the human form. His current series of work utilizes computer modeling to control the kind and degree of distortion imposed on a given object or data set. “I am interested,” he writes, “in the gap between the virtual space of the computer and the tangibility of sculptural object.”

The Cult of Touch, 1999 and Pointer, 1999, are part of a series of digitally elongated hands that resemble the expressionist works of Alberto Giacometti. Meant to be mounted on the wall, The Cult of Touch, is an open upturned hand which holds a scaled prototype of a microscope. Collins began by making an alginate cast of his hand, translated it into plaster and scanned the plaster hand with a 3D laser digitizer. The full scale digital model was reduced in width and depth to give it the effect of stretch. The hand was then machined using CNC milling in a material called Renshape 450 (a high density urethane).

The Cult of Touch

Forgetting Ourselves

Forgetting Ourselves, 1995-1999, explores the artist’s interest in computer aided morphing in a triptych of 25% life-size bronze heads: a self portrait, a portrait of Collins’ elderly mother and an interpolation (morph) between himself and his mother. The strange ‘third being” eerily carries some of the characteristics of both mother and son. Begun in the computer in 1995 and realized in striated bronze in 1999, the work has become emblematic of the inevitability of genetics and the subtle shifts in power, authority and responsibility that come with aging. Two “portrait heads” were created by scanning live objects. The morph was created in ECHO software and translated into .STL files which produce an STL directly in investment casting wax, from which the bronze was built. The striations on the surface of the bronze are artifacts of the RP process. (M>M)