Frank Gehry pioneered the use of CAD tools to turn tabletop prototypes made out of everyday materials into buildings. Larry Sass is using CAD tools to make buildings out of everyday materials. Etienne Delacroix is using CAD tools to make computers out of everyday materials.
Etienne was trained as a physicist, then came to the conclusion that his experience doing science could form a foundation for doing art. He spent fifteen years as a painter, working out of a studio in Paris. Then, in 1998 he came as a visiting scholar to MIT, where he began experimenting with bringing the approach of an artist to the use of technological tools. He made software sketches of painting programs with user interfaces aimed at artists rather than computer scientists. And he started thinking about how to extend the expressiveness of an artist’s studio into the domain of computer hardware.
That thought led him on a nomadic journey, ending up in 2000 in Uruguay and Brazil, where he found a fertile intersection of technological, cultural opportunity, and need. In a series of workshops, he started teaching engineers how to work like artists, rather than the more common goal of teaching artists to use the tools of engineers. Like Frank Gehry, Etienne sought to retain the hands-on approach of an artist in a studio, directly manipulating materials. But unlike Gehry, Etienne’s materials were electronic.
Etienne started with the mountains of technological junk that are piling up around the world, in poor as well as rich countries. He chopped discarded computers and consumer electronics to bits. Chips and components were desoldered from circuit boards and sorted. Like a good scavenger, he let nothing go to waste—the circuit boards themselves were cut up for use as a construction material, and even the solder was collected for use in making new circuits.
The result was a kind of high-tech raw material. Etienne and his students approached it almost like archaeologists, extracting the condensed engineering knowledge that it contained. Having taught his students how to deconstruct modern technology Etienne showed them how to reconstruct it into new forms. They started with the basics, like power supplies, switches, and lights. As they mastered working with this medium, they progressed through digital logic and microprocessor programming, eventually building complete working computers out of discarded materials.
Hundreds of students showed up for his workshops, somewhere between eager and desperate to gain control over the technological trash around them. In the middle of communities torn by economic, social, and political unrest, Etienne encountered a response exactly like the one I saw at MIT on “How To Make (almost) Anything.”
Etienne found that the most difficult technical lesson to teach was imagination. He could see the possibilities lurking within technological junk, but he had a hard time conveying to students how to put the pieces back together short of actually doing it himself. This problem inspired Etienne to turn to the same kind of three-dimensional CAD software that Frank Gehry and Larry Sass were using. He taught his students how to make a virtual version of their studio, freeing them to assemble simulated parts. When they found a good way to put those together, they could then build with the real components, making best use of their available resources to turn trash into treasures.
Etienne’s use of CAD tools to model the construction of a computer is literally pushing the boundaries of engineering software. In the aerospace and auto industries, where three-dimensional design tools were developed, the software models the construction of a car or plane. These CAD models contain subsystems, such as the dimensions and Connections of a car radio or navigation computer, but don’t descend down to the details of individual circuit components. The contents of the subsystems reside with the vendors that produce them. But to simulate remanufacturing discarded digital hardware, Etienne needed to open the boundaries between subsystems in order to simultaneously model the electrical and mechanical components, their circuit and structural connections, and the physical and software architecture that holds it all together. In current engineering practice those design functions might be decomposed over ten programs: one for 2D design, another for 3D design, a program to draw circuits, another to lay out printed circuit boards, one to program microcontrollers, a different one to program microprocessors, a program for generating manufacturing toolpaths, one for modeling the mechanical forces, another for modeling electromagnetic radiation, and one more for airflow and heat transfer. A current frontier in the development of engineering software is the integration of all those levels of description into a single environment that can span all the different elements of a design such as Etienne’s.
Frank, Larry, and Etienne are all pioneers in exploring the opportunities afforded by turning physical objects into digital data, and vice versa. A mathematical specification, a graphical rendering, a tabletop prototype, and a full-size structure can now contain exactly the same information, just represented in different forms. The intersection of 3D scanning, modeling, and printing blurs the boundaries between artist and engineer, architect and builder, designer and developer, bringing together not just what they do but how they think. When these functions are accessible to individuals, they can reflect the interests of individuals, whether architecting an art museum made to look like a tabletop model, low-income housing made like a tabletop model, or a computer made by modeling recycled refuse.