AMod - the RepRap movement in Art and Design

Engineers, scientists and mathematicians created the industrial revolution.

Then, a century later, the arts came huffing and puffing along behind. They devised a style unique in history - Modernism. Modernism was the art of the machines - form following function where the only functions available were the rectilinear ones of the tool slideway and the optical straight of a theodolite's line-of-sight.

Ideas are startling and original, then they are irritating clichés, then they are unnoticed parts of the language. The same is true of styles. Modernism became a cliché when mildly desperate practitioners found it necessary to overlay it with irony and preface it with "post-". Now it is just a weightless word, is used by everyone, and has become the default. The products of the 21st century electronics industry are the apothiosis of Modernism, but are styled without the stylists knowing what cities the Staatliches Bauhaus visited or who Walter Gropius might have been.

Almost every previous movement in art had aped biology, like the enhanced literalism of Grinling Gibbons or the elegant partial abstractions of Yellow-Book-period Art Nouveau.

Biology is notable for many important things, such as Darwinian evolution and its planet-shaping power. A notability of lesser importance is that biological organisms are machines of an intricacy undreamed of by James Watt or Intel, but without a single straight line between all of them.

to top